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And I Ask Myself And You, Which Of Our Visions Will Claim Us Which Will We Claim How Will We Go On Living How Will We Touch, What Will We Know What Will We Say To Each Other.

-Adrienne Rich

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And I Ask Myself

Adrienne Rich

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And I Ask Myself And You, Which Of Our Visions Will Claim Us Which Will We Claim How Will We Go On Living How Will We Touch, What Will We Know What Will We Say To Each Other.

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It's As If, In The Mother's Eyes, Her Smile, Her Stroking Touch, The Child First Reads The Message:'you Are There!'

Weather Abroad And Weather In The Heart Alike Come On Regardless Of Prediction.

I Believe That Words Can Help Us Move Or Keep Us Paralysed, And That Our Choices Of Language And Verbal Tone Have Something - A Great Deal - To Do With How We Live Our Lives And Whom We End Up Speaking With And Hearing; And That We Can Deflect Words By Trivialization, Of Course, But Also By Ritualized Respect, Or We Can Let Them Enter Our Souls And Mix With The Juices Of Our Minds.

Much Male Fear Of Feminism Is The Fear That, In Becoming Whole Human Beings, Women Will Cease To Mother Men, To Provide The Breast, The Lullaby, The Continuous Attention Associated By The Infant With The Mother. Much Male Fear Of Feminism Is Infantilism–the Longing To Remain The Mother’s Son, To Possess A Woman Who Exists Purely For Him.

I Came To Explore The Wreck.

In A World Where Language And Naming Are Power, Silence Is Oppression, Is Violence.

Every Journey Into The Past Is Complicated By Delusions, False Memories, False Namings Of Real Events.

Poetry Is The Liquid Voice That Can Wear Through Stone.

I Keep Coming Back To You In My Head, But You Couldn't Know That, And I Have No Carbons.

Missing Someone

If We Had Time And No Money, Living By Our Wits, What Story Would You Tell?

Lies Are Usually Attempts To Make Everything Simpler - For The Liar - Than It Really Is, Or Ought To Be.

Marriage Is Lonelier Than Solitude.

You Have To Give Your Art Everything You Can - I Don't Mean Only Writing, But Studying Other Poets And Poetics, Thinking, Reading What Poets Have Written Other Than Their Poetry.

... In A History Of Spiritual Rupture, A Social Compact Built On Fantasy And Collective Secrets, Poetry Becomes More Necessary Than Ever: It Keeps The Underground Aquifers Flowing; It Is The Liquid Voice That Can Wear Through Stone.

A Thinking Woman Sleeps With Monsters.

Nothing Could Have Prepared Me For The Realization That I Was A Mother ... When I Knew I Was Still In A State Of Uncreation Myself.

When Someone With The Authority Of A Teacher, Say, Describes The World And You Are Not In It, There Is A Moment Of Psychic Disequilibrium, As If You Looked Into A Mirror And Saw Nothing. Yet You Know You Exist And Others Like You, That This Is A Game With Mirrors. It Takes Some Strength Of Soul--and Not Just Individual Strength, But Collective Understanding--to Resist This Void, This Nonbeing, Into Which Are Thrust, And To Stand Up, Demanding To Be Seen And Heard.

Individual Strength

The Beauty Of Darkness Is How It Lets You See.

Strangers Are An Endangered Species.

Endangered Species

Can Individual Psychic Wounds Really Heal In An Abusive And Fragmented Society? Audre Lorde Has A Poem Which Begins, "what Do We Want From Each Other/ After We Have Told Our Stories?" Where Do We Go To Explore Our Stake With Others In Such A Society?

These Scars Bear Witness But Whether To Repair Or To Destruction I No Longer Know.

Only Where There Is Language Is There World.

Life On The Planet Is Born Of Woman.

Inspirational Life

We Can Count On So Few People To Go That Hard Way With Us.

I Am Uncomfortable With Talking Of Poetry As A Priestly Profession, Because I Have Little Use For Organized Religions And Priestly Hierarchies. They Have Demoralized, Persecuted, So Many, Including Women, Gays, Non-believers.

The Dialectic Between Change And Continuity Is A Painful But Deeply Instructive One, In Personal Life As In The Life Of A People.to "see The Light" Too Often Has Meant Rejecting The Treasures Found In Darkness.

Re-vision -- The Act Of Looking Back, Of Seeing With Fresh Eyes, Of Entering An Old Text From A New Critical Direction - Is For Women More Than A Chapter In Cultural History: It Is An Act Of Survival.

In The States, There Has Been, Compared To The Sixties And Seventies, A Huge Retrenchment - Not Just In Poetry - Into The Personal. A Withdrawal From Thinking In Terms Of Social And Collective Values, Needs And Solutions. The Consciousness-raising Groups Of The Women's Movement, For Instance, Becoming "support-groups" Or Therapy Groups.

Motherhood, In The Sense Of An Intense, Reciprocal Relationship With A Particular Child, Or Children, Is One Part Of Female Process; It Is Not An Identity For All Time.

A Language Is A Map Of Our Failures

War Is An Absolute Failure Of Imagination, Scientific And Political. That A War Can Be Represented As Helping A People To 'feel Good' About Themselves, Or Their Country, Is A Measure Of That Failure.

Saw You Walking Barefoot Taking A Long Look At The New Moon's Eyelid Later Spread Sleep-fallen, Naked In Your Dark Hair Asleep But Not Oblivious Of The Unslept Unsleeping Elsewhere Tonight I Think No Poetry Will Serve Syntax Of Rendition: Verb Pilots The Plane Adverb Modifies Action Verb Force-feeds Noun Submerges The Subject Noun Is Choking Verb Disgraced Goes On Doing Now Diagram The Sentence

There Must Be Those Among Whom We Can Sit Down And Weep And Still Be Counted As Warriors.

But Nothing Less Than The Most Radical Imagination Will Carry Us Beyond This Place, Beyond The Mere Struggle For Survival, To That Lucid Recognition Of Our Possibilities Which Will Keep Us Impatient, And Unresigned To Mere Survival.

Since We're Not Young, Weeks Have To Do Time For Years Of Missing Each Other.yet Only This Odd Warp In Time Tells Me We're Not Young.

We Who Were Loved Will Never Unlive That Crippling Fever.

Change Is Not A Threat To Your Life, But An Invitation To Live.

When I Talk Of Taking A Trip I Mean Forever.

Re-vision – The Act Of Looking Back, Of Seeing With Fresh Eyes, Of Entering An Old Text From A New Critical Direction – Is For Woman More Than A Chapter In Cultural History: It Is An Act Of Survival. Until We Understand The Assumptions In Which We Are Drenched We Cannot Know Ourselves. And This Drive To Self-knowledge, For Women, Is More Than A Search For Identity: It Is Part Of Our Refusal Of The Self-destructiveness Of Male-dominated Society.

I've Known Great Happiness In My Life Along With Great Darkness, And A Question That Has Repeatedly Entered My Poetry Has Been, How Do We Use The Direct Experience Of Happiness That May Be Given Us, Whether Of Love And Sexuality Or Creativity Or The Sense Of Connectedness With Other Beings, Human And Otherwise?

And I Ask Myself And You, Which Of Our Visions Will Claim Us Which Will We Claim How Will We Go On Living How Will We Touch, What Will We Know What Will We Say To Each Other.

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

You Have To Be Free To Play Around With The Notion That Day Might Be Night, Love Might Be Hate; Nothing Can Be Too Sacred For The Imagination To Turn Into Its Opposite Or To Call Experimentally By Another Name. For Writing Is Re-naming.

Experience Is Always Larger Than Language.

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.

In [family Snapshots] The Flow Of Profane Time Has Been Stopped And A Sacred Interval Of Self-conscious Revelation Has Been Cut From It By The Edge Of The Picture Frame And The Light Of The Sun Or The Flash.

When Someone With The Authority Of A Teacher Describes The World And You’re Not In It, There’s A Moment Of Psychic Disequilibrium, As If You Looked Into A Mirror And Saw Nothing.

[the Poet] Is Endowed To Speak For Those Who Do Not Have The Gift Of Language, Or To See For Those Who - For Whatever Reasons - Are Less Conscious Of What They Are Living Through. It Is As Though The Risks Of The Poet's Existence Can Be Put To Some Use Beyond Her Own Survival.

I've Had To Guess At Her, Sewing Her Skin Together As I Sew Mine, Though With A Different Stitch

I Choose To Love This Time For Once With All My Intelligence -from "splittings

Poems Are Like Dreams: In Them You Put What You Don't Know You Know.

What Kind Of Beast Would Turn Its Life Into Words?

Despair, When Not The Response To Absolute Physical And Moral Defeat Is, Like War, The Failure Of Imagination.

The [vietnam War Memorial] Wall Became A Magnet For Citizens Of Every Generation, Class, Race, And Relationship To The War Perhaps Because It Is The Only Great Public Monument That Allows The Anesthetized Holes In The Heart To Fill With A Truly National Grief.

...you Look At Me Like An Emergency

Women Have Always Been Seen As Waiting: Waited To Be Asked, Waiting For Our Menses, In Fear Lest They Do Or Do Not Come, Waiting For Men To Come Home From Wars, Or From Work, Waiting For Children To Grow Up, Or For The Birth Of A New Child, Or For Menopause.

It's Exhilarating To Be Alive In A Time Of Awakening Consciousness; It Can Also Be Confusing, Disorienting, And Painful.

We Have Seen Over And Over That White Male Historians In General Have Tended To Dismiss Any History They Didn't Themselves Write,on The Grounds That It Is Unserious, Unscholarly, A Fad, Too "political," "merely" Oral And Thus Unreliable.

I Believe That Words Can Help Us Move Or Keep Us Paralyzed, And That Our Choices Of Language And Verbal Tone Have Something - A Great Deal - To Do With How We Live Our Lives.

They Can Rule The World While They Can Persuade Us Our Pain Belongs In Some Order Is Death By Famine Worse Than Death By Suicide, Than A Life Of Famine And Suicide...?

In America We Have Only The Present Tense. I Am In Danger. You Are In Danger.

That's Why I Want To Speak To You Now. To Say: No Person, Trying To Take Responsibility For Her Or His Identity, Should Have To Be So Alone. There Must Be Those Among Whom We Can Sit Down And Weep, And Still Be Counted As Warriors. (i Make Up This Strange, Angry Packet For You, Threaded With Love.) I Think You Thought There Was No Such Place For You, And Perhaps There Was None Then, And Perhaps There Is None Now; But We Will Have To Make It, We Who Want An End To Suffering, Who Want To Change The Laws Of History, If We Are Not To Give Ourselves Away.

It Is Important To Possess A Short-term Pessimism And A Long-term Optimism.

We've Learned A Lot From The Great Psychologists. Wilhelm Reich Wrote About The Relationship Between Fascism And Sexual Repression. Freud Rediscovered The Underworld Of Consciousness That European Rationalism Had Denied. But When You Have A Nation Of People In Therapy And Counselling, "support" Groups For Every Kind Of Human Condition, Where, In The Clichés Of That Milieu, People "share" And "heal," The Question, "what For?", "what Now?" Is No Longer Asked.

For Now, Poetry Has The Capacity - In Its Own Ways And By Its Own Means - To Remind Us Of Something We Are Forbidden To See.

When One Woman Tells Her Truth, It Makes A Space For Other Women To Tell Their Truths.

We Assume That Politicians Are Without Honor. We Read Their Statements Trying To Crack The Code. The Scandals Of Their Politics: Not So Much That Men In High Places Lie, Only That They Do So With Such Indifference, So Endlessly, Still Expecting To Be Believed. We Are Accustomed To The Contempt Inherent In The Political Lie.

The Liar Often Suffers From Amnesia. Amnesia Is The Silence Of The Unconscious.

We Might Possess Every Technological Resource... But If Our Language Is Inadequate, Our Vision Remains Formless, Our Thinking And Feeling Are Still Running In The Old Cycles, Our Process May Be 'revolutionary' But Not Transformative.

The Mind's Passion Is All For Singling Out. Obscurity Has Another Tale To Tell.

I Am A Feminist Because I Feel Endangered, Psychically And Physically, By This Society And Because I Believe That The Women's Movement Is Saying That We Have Come To An Edge Of History When Men - Insofar As They Are Embodiments Of The Patriarchal Idea - Have Become Dangerous To Children And Other Living Things, Themselves Included

There Is No 'the Truth','a Truth' - Truth Is Not One Thing, Or Even A System. It Is An Increasing Complexity. The Pattern Of The Carpet Is A Surface. When We Look Closely, Or When We Become Weavers, We Learn Of The Tiny Multiple Threads Unseen In The Overall Pattern, The Knots On The Underside Of The Carpet

We Need To Imagine A World In Which Every Woman Is The Presiding Genius Of Her Own Body. In Such A World Women Will Truly Create New Life, Bringing Forth Not Only Children If And As We Choose But The Visions, And The Thinking, Necessary To Sustain, Console And Alter Human Existence-a New Relationship To The Universe. Sexuality, Politics, Intelligence, Power, Motherhood, Work, Community, Intimacy Will Develop New Meanings; Thinking Itself Will Be Transformed. This Is Where We Have To Begin.

New Relationship

As A Society In Turmoil, We Are Going To See More, And More Various, Attempts To Simulate Order Through Repression; And Art Is A Historical Target For Such Efforts.

Responsibility To Yourself Means That You Don't Fall For Shallow And Easy Solutions-it Means That You Refuse To Sell Your Talents And Aspirations Short.

Art And Literature Have Given So Many People The Relief Of Feeling Connected - Pulled Us Out Of Isolation. It Has Let Us Know That Somebody Else Breathed And Dreamed And Had Sex And Loved And Raged And Knew Loneliness The Way We Do.

To Write As If Your Life Depended On It; To Write Across The Chalkboard, Putting Up There In Public The Words You Have Dredged; Sieved Up In Dreams, From Behind Screen Memories, Out Of Silence-- Words You Have Dreaded And Needed In Order To Know You Exist.

I Don’t Think We Can Separate Art From Overall Human Dignity And Hope.

False History Gets Made All Day, Any Day, The Truth Of The New Is Never On The News.

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.

Responsibility To Yourself Means Refusing To Let Others Do Your Thinking, Talking, And Naming For You; It Means Learning To Respect And Use Your Own Brains And Instincts; Hence, Grappling With Hard Work.

In A Society Where Some People Are Far More Educated Than Others, In Which Public Education Is Ill-funded - Here I Am Speaking Of The U.s. - While We Build More And More Prisons To Incarcerate Youth Who Ought To Be In School, There Is Already A Gap Between Those With Education And Those Without. Those With Educational Privilege Can Be Seen As Arrogant, Remote, Alien - And Very Often They Believe Themselves Superior.

I Touch You Knowing We Weren't Born Tomorrow, And Somehow, Each Of Us Will Help The Other Live, And Somewhere, Each Of Us Must Help The Other Die.

It Will Take All Your Heart, It Will Take All Your Breath It Will Be Short, It Will Not Be Simple

An Honorable Human Relationship ... Is A Process, Delicate, Violent, Often Terrifying To Both Persons Involved, A Process Of Refining The Truths They Can Tell Each Other.

When My Dreams Showed Signs Of Becoming Politically Correct No Unruly Images Escaping Beyond Borders ... Then I Began To Wonder

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.

Art Means Nothing If It Simply Decorates The Dinner Table Of Power Which Holds It Hostage.

The Words Are Purposes./the Words Are Maps./i Came To See The Damage That Was Done/and The Treasures That Prevail.

You Must Write, And Read, As If Your Life Depended On It.

The Unconscious Wants Truth. It Ceases To Speak To Those Who Want Something Else More Than Truth.

The Most Notable Fact That Our Culture Imprints On Women Is A Sense Of Our Limits. The Most Important Thing A Woman Can Do For Another Is To Illuminate Her Actual Possibilities.

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.

I Have An Inward Treasure Born With Me, Which Can Keep Me Alive If All The Extraneous Delights Should Be Withheld Or Offered Only At A Price I Cannot Afford To Give.

War Is An Absolute Failure Of Imagination, Scientific And Political.

Courage Is Not Defined By Those Who Fought And Did Not Fall, But By Those Who Fought, Fell And Rose Again.

I Don't Want To Succumb To The Idea That For The Generation, Or Generations, Raised On Television, The Text Is Irrelevant Or So Intimidating That They Won't Deal With It. If You Teach, You See This Is Not True. It May Be That Newer Generations Do Not Worship The Text As Some Of Their Elders Do.

The Kind Of Poetry That Interests Me Is Intellectual And Moral And Political And Sexual And Sensual - All Of That Fermenting Together. It Can Speak To People Who Have Themselves Felt Like Monsters And Say: You Are Not Alone, This Is Not Monstrous. It Can Disturb And Enrapture.

Abortion Is Violence; A Deep, Desperate Violence Inflicted By A Woman Upon, First Of All, Herself.

To Do Something Very Common, In My Own Way.

If You Are Trying To Transform A Brutalized Society Into One Where People Can Live In Dignity And Hope, You Begin With The Empowering Of The Most Powerless. You Build From The Ground Up.

If I Cling To Circumstances I Could Feel Not Responsible. Only She Who Says She Did Not Choose, Is The Loser In The End.

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.

It Is The Suffering Of Ambivalence: The Murderous Alternation Between Bitter Resentment And Raw-edged Nerves, And Blissful Gratification And Tenderness

... How Have I Used Rivers, How Have I Used Wars To Escape Writing Of The Worst Thing Of All-- Not The Crimes Of Other, Not Even Our Own Death, But The Failure To Want Our Freedom Passionately Enough So That Blighted Elms, Sick Rivers, Massacres Would Seem Mere Emblems Of That Desecration Of Ourselves?

The Difficulty Of Saying I-a Phrase From The East German Novelist Christa Wolf. But Once Having Said It, As We Realize The Necessity To Go Further, Isn't There A Difficulty Of Saying 'we'? You Cannot Speak For Me. I Cannot Speak For You. Two Thoughts: There Is No Liberation That Only Knows How To Say 'i'; There Is No Collective Movement That Speaks For Each Of Us All The Way Through.

Increasingly I Think Of Poetry As A Theatre Of Voices, Not As Coming From A Single "i" Or From Any One Position. I Want To Imagine Voices Different From My Own.

We Are, None Of Us, 'either' Mothers Or Daughters; To Our Amazement, Confusion, And Greater Complexity, We Are Both.

A Decade Of Cutting Away Dead Flesh, Cauterizing Old Scars Ripped Open Over And Over And Still It Is Not Enough.

In The Middle-class United States, A Veneer Of "alternative Lifestyles" Disguises The Reality That, Here As Everywhere, Women's Apparent "choices" Whether Or Not To Have Children Are Still Dependent On The Far From Neutral Will Of Male Legislators, Jurists, A Male Medical And Pharmaceutical Profession, Well-financed Lobbies, Including The Prelates Of The Catholic Church, And The Political Reality That Women Do Not As Yet Have Self-determination Over Our Bodies And Still Live Mostly In Ignorance Of Our Authentic Physicality, Our Possible Choices, Our Eroticism Itself.

Your Mind Now, Moldering Like Wedding-cake, Heavy With Useless Experience, Rich With Suspicion, Rumour, Fantasy, Crumbling To Pieces Under The Knife-edge Of Mere Fact. In The Prime Of Your Life.

... If, As Women, We Accept A Philosophy Of History That Asserts That Women Are By Definition Assimilated Into The Male Universal,that We Can Understand Our Past Through A Male Lens--if We Are Unaware That Women Even Have A History--we Live Our Lives Similarly Unanchored, Drifting In Response To A Veering Wind Of Myth And Bias.

The Ocean, Whose Tides Respond, Like Women's Menses, To The Pull Of The Moon, The Ocean Which Corresponds To The Amniotic Fluid In Which Human Life Begins, The Ocean On Whose Surface Vessels (personified As Female) Can Ride But In Whose Depth Sailors Meet Their Death And Monsters Conceal Themselves... It Is Unstable And Threatening As The Earth Is Not; It Spawns New Life Daily, Yet Swallows Up Lives; It Is Changeable Like The Moon, Unregulated, Yet Indestructible And Eternal.

The Unconscious Wants Truth, As The Body Does. The Complexity And Fecundity Of Dreams Come From The Complexity And Fecundity Of The Unconscious Struggling To Fulfill That Desire. The Complexity And Fecundity Of Poetry Come From The Same Struggle.

Women's Studies Can Amount Simply To Compensatory History; Too Often They Fail To Challenge The Intellectual And Political Structures That Must Be Challenged If Women As A Group Are Ever To Come Into Collective, Nonexclusionary Freedom.

A President Cannot Meaningfully Honor Certain Token Artists While The People At Large Are So Dishonored.'”

Lesbian Existence Comprises Both The Breaking Of A Taboo And The Rejection Of A Compulsory Way Of Life. It Is Also A Direct Or Indirect Attack On The Male Right Of Access To Women.

Heterosexuality

I Feel More Helpless With You Than Without You.

Even Where Love Has Run Thin The Child's Soul Musters Strength... The Rush Of Purpose To Make A Life Worth Living Past Abandonment Building The Layers Up Again Over The Torn Hole.

What Would It Mean To Live In A City Whose People Were Changing Each Other's Despair Into Hope?-- You Yourself Must Change It.

Language Is As Real, As Tangible, In Our Lives As Streets, Pipelines, Telephone Switchboards, Microwaves, Radioactivity, Cloning Laboratories, Nuclear Power Stations.

No One Ever Told Us We Had To Study Our Lives,make Of Our Lives A Study, As If Learning Natural Historyor Music, That We Should Beginwith The Simple Exercises Firstand Slowly Go On Tryingthe Hard Ones, Practicing Till Strengthand Accuracy Became One With The Daringto Leap Into Transcendence, Take The Chance Of Breaking Down In The Wild Arpeggioor Faulting The Full Sentence Of The Fugue.

The Suppressed Lesbian I Had Been Carrying In Me Since Adolescence Began To Stretch Her Limbs.

It Iscrucial That We Understand Lesbian/feminism In The Deepest, Most Radical Sense: As That Love For Ourselves And Other Women, That Commitment To The Freedom Of All Of Us, Which Transcends The Category Of "sexual Preference" And The Issue Of Civil Rights, To Become A Politics Of Asking Women's Questions, Demanding A World In Which The Integrity Of All Women--not A Chosen Few--shall Be Honored And Validated In Every Respect Of Culture.

The Serious Revolutionary, Like The Serious Artist, Can't Afford To Lead A Sentimental Or Self-deceiving Life.

Across The Curve Of The Earth, There Are Women Getting Up Before Dawn, In The Blackness Before The Point Of Light, In The Twilight Before Sunrise; There Are Women Rising Earlier Than Men And Children To Break The Ice, To Start The Stove, To Put Up The Pap, The Coffee, The Rice, To Iron The Pants, To Braid The Hair, To Pull The Day's Water Up From The Well, To Boil Water For Tea, To Wash The Children For School, To Pull The Vegetables And Start The Walk To Market, To Run To Catch The Bus For The Work That Is Paid. I Don't Know When Most Women Sleep.

Poetry Can Add Its Grain To An Accumulation Of Consciousness Against The Idea That There Is No Alternative - That We're Just In The Great Flow Of Capitalism And It Can Never Be Any Different - That This Is Human Destiny, This Is Human Nature.

To Work And Suffer Is To Be At Home. All Else Is Scenery.

"global Culture" Is Of Course Not A Culture: It's The Global Marketing And Imposing Of Commodities And Images For The Interests Of The Few At The Expense Of The Many.

... This World Gives No Room To Be What We Dreamt Of Being

Sexist Grammar Burns Into The Brains Of Little Girls And Young Women A Message That The Male Is The Norm, The Standard, The Central Figure Beside Which We Are All Deviants, The Marginal, The Dependent Variables. It Lays The Foundation For Androcentric Thinking, And Leaves Men Safe In Their Solipsistic Tunnel-vision.

Poetry Has Always Mattered, Through Human History, Through All Kinds Of Cultures, All Kinds Of Violence And Human Desolation, As Well As Periods Of Great Human Affirmation. It's Been Associated With The Power Of The Word, With The Sacred, With Magic And Transformation, With The Oral Narratives That Help A People Cohere.

Motherhood Is The Great Mesh In Which All Human Relations Are Entangled, In Which Lurk Our Most Elemental Assumptions About Love And Power.

As Her Sons Have Seen Her: The Mother In Patriarchy: Controlling, Erotic, Castrating, Heart-suffering, Guilt-ridden, And Guilt-provoking; A Marble Brow, A Huge Breast, An Avid Cave; Between Her Legs Snakes, Swamp-grass, Or Teeth; On Her Lap A Helpless Infant Or A Martyred Son. She Exists For One Purpose: To Bear And Nourish The Son.

To Seek Visions, To Dream Dreams, Is Essential, And It Is Also Essential To Try New Ways Of Living, To Make Room For Serious Experimentation, To Respect The Effort Even Where It Fails.

Pride Is A Tricky, Glorious, Double-edged Feeling.

Writers Matter In A Society To The Extent That We Can Help That Society Hear Its Unvoiced Longing, Encounter Its Erased And Disregarded Selves, Break With Complacency, Numbness, Despair.

One Does Not Give Birth In A Void, But Rather In A Cultural And Political Context. Laws, Professional Codes, Religious Sanctions, And Ethnic Traditions All Affect Women's Choices Concerning Childbirth.

A Revolutionary Poem Will Not Tell You Who Or When To Kill, What And When To Burn, Or Even How To Theorize. It Reminds You... Where And When And How You Are Living And Might Live, It Is A Wick Of Desire.

Our Personalities Seem Dangerously To Blur And Overlap With Our Mother's; And, In A Desperate Attempt To Know Where Mother Ends And Daughter Begins, We Perform Radical Surgery.

Not Biology, But Ignorance Of Ourselves, Has Been The Key To Our Powerlessness

The Password Is A Flicker Of An Eyelash.

I Think Of Poetry As Something Out There In The World And Within Each Of Us. I Don't Mean That Everyone Can Write Poetry - It's An Art, A Craft, It Requires Enormous Commitment Like Any Art. But There's A Core Of Desire In Each Of Us And Poetry Goes To And Comes From That Core. It's The Social, Economic, Institutional Gap That Makes It Difficult.

A Book Of Poems Doesn't Just Come Out By Chance, An Editor Has To Select It, A Publisher Has To Distribute It Or You Will Never See It.

I Do Not Think [poetry] Is More, Or Less, Necessary Than Food, Shelter, Health, Education, Decent Working Conditions. It Is As Necessary.

Health Education

In The Nineteenth Year And The Eleventh Month Speak Your Tattered Kaddish For All Suicides: Praise To Life Though It Crumbled In Like A Tunnel On Ones We Knew And Loved Praise To Life Though Its Windows Blew Shut On The Breathing-room Of Ones We Knew And Loved Praise To Life Though Ones We Knew And Loved Loved It Badly, Too Well, And Not Enough Praise To Life Though It Tightened Like A Knot On The Hearts Of Ones We Thought We Knew Loved Us Praise To Life Giving Room And Reason To Ones We Knew And Loved Who Felt Unpraisable. Praise To Them, How They Loved It, When They Could.

... Passion For Survival Is The Great Theme Of Women's Poetry.

The Connections Between And Among Women Are The Most Feared, The Most Problematic, And The Most Potentially Transforming Force On The Planet.

Those Who Speak Largely Of The Human Condition Are Usually Those Most Exempt From Its Oppressions - Whether Of Sex, Race, Or Servitude.

The Longer I Live The More I Mistrust Theatricality, The False Glamour Cast By Performance, The More I Know Its Poverty Beside The Truths We Are Salvaging From The Splitting-open Of Our Lives. -from "transcendental Etude

Whatever Happens With Us, Your Body Will Haunt Mine

Whatever Happens

Probably There Is Nothing In Human Nature More Resonant With Charges Than The Flow Of Energy Between Two Biologically Alike Bodies, One Of Which Has Lain In Amniotic Bliss Inside The Other, One Of Which Has Labored To Give Birth To The Other. The Materials Are Here For The Deepest Mutuality And The Most Painful Estrangement.

But Before We Were Mothers, We Have Been, First Of All, Women, With Actual Bodies And Actual Minds.

I Guess What Concerns Me Always Is The Need For A Field, A Rich Compost, For Any Art To Flourish. But However Isolate Or Unheard You May Feel, If You Have The Need To Write Poetry, Are Compelled To Write It, You Go On, Whether There Is Resonance Or Not.

The Word Revolution Itself Has Become Not Only A Dead Relic Of Leftism, But A Key To The Deadendedness Of Male Politics: The Revolution Of A Wheel Which Returns In The End To The Same Place; The Revolving Door Of A Politics Which Has Liberated Women Only To Use Them, And Only Within The Limits Of Male Tolerance.

Language Is Power... Language Can Be Used As A Means Of Changing Reality.

Until We Know The Assumptions In Which We Are Drenched, We Cannot Know Ourselves.

We See Daily That Our Lives Are Terrible And Little, Without Continuity, Buyable And Salable At Any Moment, Mere Blips On A Screen, That This Is The Way We Live Now. Memory Marketed As Nostalgia; Terror Reduced To Mere Suspense, To Melodrama.

The Liar Leads An Existence Of Unutterable Loneliness.

I Define "politics" As The On-going Collective Struggle For Liberation And For The Power To Create - Not Only Works Of Art, But Also Just And Nonviolent Social Institutions.

One Of The Great Functions Of Art Is To Help Us Imagine What It Is Like To Be Not Ourselves, What It Is Like To Be Someone Or Something Else, What It Is Like To Live In Another Skin, What It Is Like To Live In Another Body, And In That Sense To Surpass Ourselves, To Go Out Beyond Ourselves.

Heterosexuality Has Been Forcibly And Subliminally Imposed On Women. Yet Everywhere Women Have Resisted It, Often At The Cost Of Physical Torture, Imprisonment, Psychosurgery, Social Ostracism, And Extreme Poverty.

Heterosexuality Is

In Order To Live A Fully Human Life We Require Not Only Control Of Our Bodies (though Control Is A Prerequisite); We Must Touch The Unity And Resonance Of Our Physicality, Our Bond With The Natural Order, The Corporeal Grounds Of Our Intelligence.

But Can You Imagine How Some Of Them Were Envying You Your Freedom To Work, To Think, To Travel, To Enter A Room As Yourself, Not As Some Child’s Mother Or Some Man’s Wife?…we Have No Familiar, Ready-made Name For A Woman Who Defines Herself, By Choice, Neither In Relation To Children Nor To Men, Who Is Self-identified, Who Has Chosen Herself.

The Danger Lies In Forgetting What We Had. The Flow Between Generations Becomes A Trickle, Grandchildren Tape-recording Grandparents' Memories On Special Occasions Perhaps-no Casual Storytelling Jogged By Daily Life, There Being No Shared Daily Life What With Migrations, Exiles, Diasporas, Rendings, The Search For Work. Or There Is A Shared Daily Life Riddled With Holes Of Silence.

When A Woman Tells The Truth She Is Creating The Possibility For More Truth Around Her.

Telling The Truth

Tv Has Created A Kind Of False Collectivity.

I Am An Instrument In The Shape/ Of A Woman Trying To Translate Pulsations/ Into Images For The Relief Of The Body/ And The Reconstruction Of The Mind.

To Read As If Your Life Depended On It Would Mean To Let Into Your Reading Your Beliefs, The Swirl Of Your Dreamlife, The Physical Sensations Of Your Ordinary Carnal Life; And Simultaneously, To Allow What You're Reading To Pierce Routines, Safe And Impermeable, In Which Ordinary Carnal Life Is Tracked, Charted, Channeled. Then, What Of The Right Answers, The So-called Multiple-choice Examination Sheet With The Number 2 Pencil To Mark One Choice And One Choice Only?

Multiple Choice

My Children Cause Me The Most Exquisite Suffering Of Which I Have Any Experience. It Is The Suffering Of Ambivalence: The Murderous Alternation Between Bitter Resentment And Raw-edged Nerves, And Blissful Gratification And Tenderness. Sometimes I Seem To Myself, In My Feelings Toward These Tiny Guiltless Beings, A Monster Of Selfishness And Intolerance.

White Hate Crimes, White Hate Speech. I Still Try To Claim I Wasn't Brought Up To Hate. But Hate Isn't The Half Of It. I Grew Up In The Vast Encircling Presumption Of Whiteness - That Primary Quality Of Being Which Knows Itself, Its Passions, Only Against An Otherness That Has To Be Dehumanized. I Grew Up In White Silence That Was Utterly Obsessional. Race Was The Theme Whatever The Topic.

The Impulse To Create Begins - Often Terribly And Fearfully - In A Tunnel Of Silence. Every Real Poem Is The Breaking Of An Existing Silence, And The First Question We Might Ask Any Poem Is, What Kind Of Voice Is Breaking Silence, And What Kind Of Silence Is Being Broken?

Poetry Is Above All A Concentration Of The Power Of Language, Which Is The Power Of Our Ultimate Relationship To Everything In The Universe.

Language And Power

What I Search For Continuously In My Art Is Adequate Language, Language I Hope Can Stand Beyond Any Particular Occasion. What I'm Finding Is That In Our Increasingly Dysfunctional U.s. Society, Marvelous Poetry Is Being Written - Out Of And Amid The Dysfunction.

No Woman Is Really An Insider In The Institutions Fathered By Masculine Consciousness. When We Allow Ourselves To Believe We Are, We Lose Touch With Parts Of Ourselves Defined As Unacceptable By That Consciousness; With The Vital Toughness And Visionary Strength Of The Angry Grandmothers, The Fierce Market Women Of The Ibo's Women's War, The Marriage-resisting Women Silk Workers Of Pre-revolutionary China, The Millions Of Widows, Midwives, And The Women Healers Tortured And Burned As Witches For Three Centuries In Europe.

We Have Lived With Violence Far Too Long.

There Is No Simple Formula For The Relationship Of Art To Justice...in The End, I Don’t Think We Can Separate Art From Overall Human Dignity And Hope. My Concern For My Country Is Inextricable From My Concerns As An Artist.

If You Think You Can Grasp Me, Think Again: My Story Flows In More Than One Direction, A Delta Springing From The River Bed With Its Five Fingers Spread.

The Mother's Battle For Her Child With Sickness, With Poverty, With War, With All The Forces Of Exploitation And Callousness That Cheapen Human Life Needs To Become A Common Human Battle, Waged In Love And In The Passion For Survival.

The Belief That Established Science And Scholarship--which Have So Relentlessly Excluded Women From Their Making--are "objective"and "value-free" And That Feminist Studies Are "unscholarly," "biased," And "ideological" Dies Hard. Yet The Fact Is That All Science, And All Scholarship, And All Art Are Ideological; There Is No Neutrality In Culture!

Behind All Art Is An Element Of Desire...love Of Life, Of Existence, Love Of Another Human Being, Love Of Human Beings Is In Some Way Behind All Art — Even The Most Angry, Even The Darkest, Even The Most Grief-stricken, And Even The Most Embittered Art Has That Element Somewhere Behind It. Because How Could You Be So Despairing, So Embittered, If You Had Not Had Something You Loved That You Lost?

Each Feminist Work Has Tended To Be Received As If It Emerged From Nowhere; As If Each One Of Us Had Lived, Thought, And Worked Without Any Historical Past Or Contextual Present. This Is One Of The Ways In Which Women's Work And Thinking Has Been Made To Seem Sporadic, Errant, Orphaned Of Any Tradition Of Its Own.

In 1945, Just At The End Of World War Ii, The American Poet Muriel Rukeyser Wrote A Remarkable Book Called The Life Of Poetry. In It She Says That On Any Particular Day In The World, If Poetry Ceased To Exist, It Would Immediately Be Reinvented On That Same Day.

I Think About The Possibilities For Empathy, For Mutual Solidarity Among Gay Men And Lesbians, Not Simply As People Who Suffer Under Homophobia, But As People Who Are Also Extremely Creative, Active, And Have A Particular Understanding Of The Human Condition.

In The Interstices Of Language Lie Powerful Secrets Of The Culture.

An Honorable Human Relationship- That Is, One In Which Two People Have The Right To Use The Word "love"- Is A Process, Delicate, Violent, Often Terrifying To Both Persons Involved, A Process Of Refining The Truths They Can Tell Each Other. It Is Important To Do This Because It Breaks Down Human Self-delusion And Isolation. It Is Important To Do This Because In Doing So We Do Justice To Our Own Complexity. It Is Important To Do This Because We Can Count On So Few People To Go That Hard Way With Us.

Can You Remember? When We Thought The Poets Taught How To Live?

Sleeping. Turning In Turn Like Planets Rotating In Their Midnight Meadow: A Touch Is Enough To Let Us Know We're Not Alone In The Universe, Even In Sleep.

We May Feel Bitterly How Little Our Poems Can Do In The Face Of Seemingly Out-of-control Technological Power And Seemingly Limitless Corporate Greed, Yet It Has Always Been True That Poetry Can Break Isolation, Show Us To Ourselves When We Are Outlawed Or Made Invisible, Remind Us Of Beauty Where No Beauty Seems Possible, Remind Us Of Kinship Where All Is Represented As Separation.

The Moment When A Feeling Enters The Body/ Is Political. This Touch Is Political

We Move But Our Words Stand Become Responsible For More Than We Intended And This Is Verbal Privilege

The Decision To Feed The World Is The Real Decision. No Revolution Has Chosen It. For That Choice Requires That Women Shall Be Free.

Every Poem Breaks A Silence That Had To Be Overcome.

Young People Know They Are Being Betrayed By He Mass Electronic Media. It Caricatures Them, Caricatures Others. It Is Not Really About Them Though It Targets Them As Consumers.

How We Dwelt In Two Worlds The Daughters And The Mothers In The Kingdom Of The Sons.

Most Women Have Not Even Been Able To Touch This Anger, Except To Drive It Inward Like A Rusted Nail.

Over Many Years So Many Poets Have Touched My Imagination And Opened Paths For Me - It Hardly Makes Sense To List Them. I Have Always Read A Great Deal Of Poetry.

No One Has Imagined Us. We Want To Live Like Trees, Sycamores Blazing Through The Sulfuric Air, Dappled With Scars, Still Exuberantly Budding, Our Animal Passion Rooted In The City.

The Channel Of Art Can Only Become Clogged And Misdirected By The Artist's Concern With Merely Temporary And Local Disturbances. The Song Is Higher Than The Struggle.

Reality, The Oppressor's Tongue.

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Barbara Cartland

Millard Fillmore

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