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...

The moment of change is the only poem

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.

There is a cop who is both prowler and father:he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,had certain ideals.You hardly know him in his boots and silver badge,on horseback, one hand touching his...

The word ”revolution” itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the ”revolution” of a wheel which returns in the end to the same...

Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you…it means that you do not treat your body as a commodity with which to purchase superficial intimacy or economic...

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which...

It’s as though she was able to convert her rage to live under this verdict of HIV into an art that was actually equal to it.

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break...

Woman-identification is a source of energy, a potential springhead of female power, violently curtailed and wasted under the institution of heterosexuality. The denial of reality and visibility to women’s passion for women, women’s choice of...

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons

The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

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...

There is no ‘the truth,’ ‘a truth’–truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.

An honorable human relationship – that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” – is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of...

We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the...

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.

Theory-the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

I don’t trust them but I’m learning to use them.

I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women’s movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history when men...

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.

Truthfulness, honor, is not something which springs ablaze of itself; it has to be created between people. This is true in political situations. The quality and depth of the politics evolving from a group depends...

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.

Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women.Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.

You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.

Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted,” for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been...

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 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...

In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite); we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the...

The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.

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.

To do something very common, in my own way.

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

We lie under the sheetafter making love, speakingof lonelinessrelieved in a bookrelived in a bookso on that pagethe clot and fissureof it appearswords of a manin paina naked wordentering the clota hand graspingthrough bars:deliveranceWhat happens...

Feminism means finally that we renounce our obedience to the fathers and recognise that the world they have described is not the whole world. Masculine ideologies are the creation of masculine subjectivity; they are neither...

When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her