I will have my voice: Indian, Spanish, white. I will have my serpent’s tongue – my woman’s voice, my sexual voice, my poet’s voice. I will overcome the tradition of silence.
To survive the Borderlands, you must live sin fronteras and be a crossroads.
I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings.
An image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious. Picture language precedes thinking in words; the metaphorical mind precedes analytical consciousness.
I change myself, I change the world.
I am visible-see this Indian face-yet I am invisible. I both blind them with my beak nose and am their blind spot. But I exist, we exist. They’d like to think I have melted in the pot. But I haven’t. We haven’t.
By writing I put order in the world, give it a handle so I can grasp it.
Why am I compelled to write? Because the writing saves me from this complacency I fear. Because I have no choice.
Living in a state of psychic unrest, in a Borderland, is what makes poets write and artists create.
Do work that matters. Vale la pena.
All reaction is limited by, and dependant on, what it is reacting against.
Enough of passivity and passing time while waiting for the boy friend, the girl friend, the Goddess, or the Revolution.
Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out.
We are taught that the body is an ignorant animal intelligence dwells only in the head. But the body is smart. It does not discern between external stimuli and stimuli from the imagination. It reacts equally viscerally to events from the imagination as it does to real events.
Depression is useful. It signals that you need to make changes in your life, it challenges your tendency to withdraw, it reminds you to take action.
I can’t seem to stay out of my own way.
I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face, to staunch the bleeding with ashes, to fashion my own gods out of my entrails...
In trying to become ‘objective,’ Western culture made ‘objects’ of things and people when it distanced itself from them, thereby losing ‘touch’ with them.
The act of writing is the act of making soul, alchemy.
But I’m more scared of not writing.
Write in the kitchen, lock yourself up in the bathroom. Write on the bus or the welfare line, on the job or during meals.