Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single "I" or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.

Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.

Courage is not defined by those who fought and did not fall, but by those who fought, fell and rose again.

Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

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

Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.

We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.