No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,our animal passion rooted in the city.
There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
There is no ‘the truth,’ ‘a truth’–truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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.
I choose to love this time for oncewith all my intelligence-from “Splittings
and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim uswhich will we claimhow will we go on livinghow will we touch, what will we knowwhat will we say to each other.
Love, our subject:we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
And yet, protest it if we will,Some corner of the mind retainsThe medieval man, who stillKeeps watch upon those starry skeinsAnd drives us out of doors at nightTo gaze at anagrams of light.
Vous travaillez pour l’armee, madame?’ (You are working for the army?), a Frenchwoman said to me early in the Vietnam war, on hearing I had three sons.
As a woman I have a country; as a woman I cannot divest myself of that country merely bu condemning its government or by saying three times “As a woman my country is the whole world.” -Notes Towards a Politics of Location.
Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees
In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
if you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces.
I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons
But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.
No person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone. There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep, and still be counted as warriors.
The problem, unstated until now, is how to live in a damaged body in a world where pain is meant to be gagged uncured ungrieved over. The problem is to connect, without hysteria, the pain of anyone’s body with the pain of the world’s body.
Silence can be a planrigorously executedthe blueprint to a lifeIt is a presenceit has a history a formDo not confuse itwith any kind of absence
Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.
But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer’s block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat.
Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.
I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.
There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men. The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.
Victories turned inside outBut no surrenderCemeteries of remorseThe beaten champion sobbingGhosts move in to shield his tears
Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
The most notable fact that culture imprints on women is the sense of our limits. The most important thing one woman can do for another is to illuminate and expand her sense of actual possibilities.
Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.
We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
The mother’s battle for her child with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.