47 quotes
To become a token woman—whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters—is to become something less than a man … since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
People have to put bread on the table and they're trying to do political work as well.
I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.
The music, the sound of words working together, has always mattered to me.
with Paris Review (2011)
In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture. (p249, "Motherhood and Daughterhood")
Of woman born: motherhood as experience and institution (1976)
The great flowering of Yiddish literature took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with the rise of Jewish secularism and the Jewish labor and socialist movements.
Introduction to A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems by Irena Klepfisz (1990)
There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected. (p55, "The 'Sacred Calling'")
Of woman born: motherhood as experience and institution (1976)
Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.-both leaders with large constituencies-had been murdered just as each was unscrolling a map on which race and class intersected in a shared landscape.
Arts of the Possible (2000)
one period's necessary strategies can mutate into the monsters of a later time.
Arts of the Possible (2000)
I still believe what I wrote in 1971: A change in the of sexual identity is essential if we are not to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution.
Arts of the Possible (2000)
False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day...
The lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.
Turning the Wheel (1981)
The split in our language between “political” and “personal” has, I think, been a trap.
with Paris Review (2011)
According to Nazi logic, my two Jewish grandparents would have made me a Mischling, first-degree-nonexempt from the Final Solution.
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)
I think that passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry. (from "Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman" 1977)
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (1979)
Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, feminist, exmatriate southerner, split at the root-that I will never bring them whole.
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)
Most biographers of women still fail to recognize that a woman's central relationship can be to her work, even as lovers come and go. ("Raya Dunayevskaya's Marx")
Arts of the Possible (2000)
What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other's despair into hope?--
You yourself must change it.--
what would it feel like to know
your country was changing?--
You yourself must change it.--
Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
what would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair?
Something has to die in order for us to begin to know our truths. Perhaps we have to lose our national fantasies.
In The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets by Bill Moyers (1996)
It (1968) was a year of intensifying political awareness for me: the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations, the Columbia strike.
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)
we need to know where we have been: we need our history.
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985 (1986)