There's been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I'm speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing. Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.

The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.

I've had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch

I am the androgyne, I am the living mind you fail to describe in your dead language the lost noun, the verb surviving only in the infinitive the letters of my name are written under the lids of the newborn child

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.

... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.

If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.