If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.

The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.

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

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