War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to 'feel good' about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.

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

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

You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.

Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.