A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
All new learning looks at first like chaos.
You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
Experience is always larger than language.
Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.
Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
When one woman tells her truth, it makes a space for other women to tell their truths.
No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
Only where there is language is there world.
Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler – for the liar – than it really is, or ought to be.
The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
We are, none of us, ‘either’ mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.
I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.
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 movement back and forth between the two.
Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me – it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.
I define “politics” as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create – not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.