Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.

Any woman's death diminishes me.

There's been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I'm speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing. Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

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

... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.