I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons.

In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming "support-groups" or therapy groups.

We have lived with violence far too long.

Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.

It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'

The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.

No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.