The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.

But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.

I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives.

We've learned a lot from the great psychologists. Wilhelm Reich wrote about the relationship between fascism and sexual repression. Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling, "support" groups for every kind of human condition, where, in the clichés of that milieu, people "share" and "heal," the question, "What for?", "What now?" is no longer asked.

I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men.

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.