Bisexuality means I am free and I am as likely to want to love a woman as I am likely to want to love a man, and what about that? Isn't that what freedom implies?

As I am a poet I express what I believe, and I fight against whatever I oppose, in poetry.

Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires.

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.

The first function of poetry is to tell the truth, to learn how to do that, to find out what you really feel and what you really think

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet