When you reach out and touch other human beings, it doesn't matter whether you call it therapy or teaching or poetry.

For within livin structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, our feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets.

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot.

I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for Humanities conference a year ago. . . .

Differences must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.

The strongest lesson I can teach my son is the same lesson I teach my daughter: how to be who he wishes to be for himself.

To face the realities of our lives is not a reason for despair-despair is a tool of your enemies. Facing the realities of our lives gives us motivation for action. For you are not powerless... You know why the hard questions must be asked. It is not altruism, it is self-preservation-survival.