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.
I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
Freedom. It isn't once, to walk out under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers of light, the fields of dark--freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering. Putting together inch by inch the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.
Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
The possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people, are a kind of alchemy. They are the most interesting thing in life. The liar is someone who keeps losing sight of these possibilities.
You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
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. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.
A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
You grieve in loneliness, and if I understand you fuck in loneliness.
Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision.
There is always an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides.
Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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 moment the feeling enters the body is political.
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 is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
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.
Any woman who has moved from the playing fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world knows the extraordinary sense of shedding, as it were, the encumbrance of someone else's baggage, of ceasing to translate.
The body has been made so problematic for women that it has often seemed easier to shrug it off and travel as a disembodied spirit.
Nothing can be done but by inches. I write out my life hour by hour, word by word . . . imagining the existence of something uncreated this poem our lives.
We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.
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.
I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.
I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes...are maps...I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail.
The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
A language is a map of our failures.
By dawn you were pure electric. You pulsed like a star. You awoke in the last darkness before the light poured in.
Let me be, always the connoisseur of your perfection.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are.
What rivets me to history is seeing / acts of survival turned / to rituals of self-hatred. This / is colonization. Unborn sisters, / look back on us in mercy where we failed ourselves, / see us not one-dimensional but with / the past as your steadying and corrective lens.
The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
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.
I ache, brilliantly.
I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.
Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
The failure to examine heterosexuality as an institution is like failing to admit that the economic system called capitalism or the caste system of racism is maintained by a variety of forces, including both physical violence and false consciousness.
The avoidance of pain - physical or psychic - is a dangerous mechanism, which can cause us to lose touch not just with our painful sensations but with ourselves.
You look at me like an emergency.
Life on the planet is born of woman.
The moment of change is the only poem.
I feel more helpless with you than without you.
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.
The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees.
Theory -the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees- theory can be a dew that rises from earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for earth. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location.
We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings. And the fear of our deepest cravings keeps them suspect, keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, and leads us to settle for...many facets of our own oppression.
I have a notion that genius knows itself; that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
