As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.

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 - insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea - have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

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.

Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.

We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both.