47 quotes
Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.
Experience is always larger than language.
Interview (1991)
I have to say that what I know I know through making poems.
Poetry and Experience (1964)
Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, glib or visionary, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness.
I believe in the necessity for a poetic language untethered from the compromised language of state and media.
Arts of the Possible (2000)
There is always that in poetry which will not be grasped, which cannot be described, which survives our ardent attention, our critical theories, our late-night arguments.
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes.
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963)
Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact.
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963)
No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination. (p17, III: "What would we create?")
What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993)
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963)
I long to create something
that can’t be used to keep us passive:
I want to write
a script about plumbing, how every pipe
is joined
to every other.
A new century, even a new technology, doesn't of itself produce newness. It is live human beings, looking in all directions, who will do this.
Arts of the Possible (2000)
If it is the present that calls us to activism, it is history that must nourish our choices and commitment.
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)
To be able to ask even the child's astonished question Why do they hate us so? means knowing how to say "we."
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)
I was admittedly young and trying to educate myself, but I was also doing something that is dangerous: I was flirting with identity.
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)
Where connections are being made always feels to me like the point of intensest life.
The experience of motherhood was eventually to radicalize me.
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)
Anti-Semitism was so intrinsic as not to have a name.
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)