Occupation: Poet Birth: May 16, 1929 Death: March 27, 2012
Any woman's death diminishes me..
[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of….
The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak t….
In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger..
One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it….
To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery..
Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome..
I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal mov….
Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth..
As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry..
There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface.….
What we see, we see and seeing is changing.
When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths..
Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire..
But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition ….
The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language….
The difficulty of saying I-a phrase from the East German novelist Christa Wolf. But once having said it, as we realize the necessity to go further, i….
There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice...In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope….
I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die..
It is the thirtieth of May, the thirtieth of November, a beginning or an end, we are moving into the solstice and there is so much here I still do no….
Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art ….