Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.

I define "politics" as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.

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.

The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.

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

motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.

It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.