Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions – whether of sex, race, or servitude.

In a world dominated by violent and passive-aggressive men, and by male institutions dispensing violence, it is extraordinary to note how often women are represented as the perpetrators of violence, most of all when we...

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.

My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes...

…you look at me like an emergency

A language is a map of our failures

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with...

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.

In all societies, women are in double jeopardy; on the one hand we are expected to conform to certain emotional standards in our relationships with others at the penalty of being declared insane; on the...

Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe. It is as if forces we can lay claim to in...

It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.

I choose to love this time for oncewith all my intelligence-from “Splittings

The StrangerLooking as I’ve looked before, straight down the heartof the street to the riverwalking the rivers of the avenuesfeeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphaltwatching the lights turn on in the towerswalking...

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her...

Re-vision–the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction–is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival....

if you unquestioningly accept one piece of the culture that despises and fears you, you are vulnerable to other pieces.

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...

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 — even the most angry, even the...

We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so...

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.

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.

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

Lying is done with words, and also with silence.

I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male “fear of women” and of women’s sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men...

We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.

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.

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...

The worker can unionize, go out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or...

the phantom of the man-who-would-understand,the lost brother, the twin —for him did we leave our mothers,deny our sisters, over and over?did we invent him, conjure himover the charring log,nights, late, in the snowbound cabindid we...

The lie [of compulsory female heterosexuality] is many-layered. In Western tradition, one layer—the romantic—asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e. g,...

Life on the planet is born of woman.

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.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.

To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence–...

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

A year, ten years from now, I’ll remember this; not why, only that we were here like this, together.

Love, our subject:we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.

I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and...

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,they happen in our lives like car crashes,books that change us, neighborhoodswe move into and come to love.Tristan and Isolde is scarcely the...

Birds and periodic blood.Old recapitulations.The fox, panting, fire-eyed,gone to earth in my chest.How beautiful we are,he and I, with our auburnpelts, our trails of blood,our miracle escapes,our whiplash panic flogging us onto new miracles!They’ve supplied...

The moment of change is the only poem.

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

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.

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

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.

The effect of male-identification means ‘internalizing the values of the colonizer and actively participating in carrying out the colonization of one’s self and one’s sex… Male identification is the act whereby women place men above...