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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.

-Adrienne Rich

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I Am An Instrument

Adrienne Rich

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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.

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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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Think My Work Comes Out Of Both An Intense Desire For Connection And What It Means To Feel Isolated. There's Always Going To Be A Kind Of Tidal Movement Back And Forth Between The Two.

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.

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.

I'd Call It Love If Love Didn't Take So Many Years But Lust Too Is A Jewel.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Marriage Is Lonelier Than Solitude.

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

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.

I Came To Explore The Wreck.

A Language Is A Map Of Our Failures

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

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

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.

The Will To Change Begins In The Body, Not In The Mind.

Poetry Is The Liquid Voice That Can Wear Through Stone.

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

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

Health Education

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

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

Lying Is Done With Words And Also With Silence.

The Liar Leads An Existence Of Unutterable Loneliness.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

There Is The Falsely Mystical View Of Art That Assumes A Kind Of Supernatural Inspiration, A Possession By Universal Forces Unrelated To Questions Of Power And Privilege Or The Artist's Relation To Bread And Blood. In This View, 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.

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.

When Someone, Let's Say A Teacher, Speaks Of The World And You Are Not In It, It's Like Looking Into The Mirror And Seeing Nothing.

Love, Our Subject: We've Trained It Like Ivy To Our Walls.

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...?

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?

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

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.

We Must Use What We Have To Invent What We Desire.

Use It Or Lose It

The Moment Of Change Is The Only Poem.

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

Tv Has Created A Kind Of False Collectivity.

The Necessity Of Poetry Has To Be Stated Over And Over, But Only To Those Who Have Reason To Fear Its Power, Or Those Who Still Believe That Language Is 'only Words' And That An Old Language Is Good Enough For Our Descriptions Of The World We Are Trying To Transform.

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

I Feel More Helpless With You Than Without You.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

[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.

The Beauty Of Darkness Is How It Lets You See.

What Kind Of Beast Would Turn Its Life Into Words?

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.

No One Sleeps In This Room Without The Dream Of A Common Language.

We Have Lived With Violence Far Too Long.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

... 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.

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.

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.

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.

Poetry Can Open Locked Chambers Of Possibiity, Restore Numbed Zones To Feeling, Recharge Desire.

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

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

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.

The Repossession By Women Of Our Bodies Will Bring Far More Essential Change To Human Society Than The Seizing Of The Means Of Production By Workers.

When I Talk Of Taking A Trip I Mean Forever.

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

Every Poem Breaks A Silence That Had To Be Overcome.

What I Discerned In The U.s. Was A Convergence Of Poetic Voices Coming From Many Different Rents In The Social Fabric, Many Cultures, Many Tributaries, Which, Together, Make Up The American Poetry Of The Late Twentieth Century.

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

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

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

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.

Experience Is Always Larger Than Language.

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.

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 Who Were Loved Will Never Unlive That Crippling Fever.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

A Thinking Woman Sleeps With Monsters.

Life On The Planet Is Born Of Woman.

Inspirational Life

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

To Do Something Very Common, In My Own Way.

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

"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.

My Heart Is Moved By All I Cannot Save: So Much Has Been Destroyed I Have To Cast My Lot With Those Who Age After Age, Perversely, With No Extraordinary Power, Reconstitute The World.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

It Is The Lesbian In Us Who Is Creative, For The Dutiful Daughter Of The Fathers In Us Is Only A Hack.

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.

Art, Whose Honesty Must Work Through Artifice, Cannot Avoid Cheating Truth.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

... 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?

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.

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

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.

It Is The Thirtieth Of May, The Thirtieth Of November, A Beginning Or An End, We Are Moving Into The Solstice And There Is So Much Here I Still Do Not Understand.

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

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

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

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

Whatever Happens With Us, Your Body Will Haunt Mine

Whatever Happens

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.

Women Have Been Driven Mad, “gaslighted”, For Centuries By The Refutation Of Our Experience And Our Instincts In A Culture Which Validates Only Male Experience. The Truth Of Our Bodies And Our Minds Has Been Mystified To Us. We Therefore Have Primary Obligation To Each Other: Not To Undermine Each Other’s Sense Of Reality For The Sake Of Expediency; Not To Gaslight Each Other.

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.

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

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

Poetry Reaches Into Places In Us That We Are Suppose To Ignore Or Mistrust, That Are Perceived As Subversive Or Non-useful, In What Is Fast Becoming Known As Global Culture.

The Password Is A Flicker Of An Eyelash.

What We See, We See And Seeing Is Changing

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

... 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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 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?

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

Missing Someone

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Women's Movement Appeared At A Very Crucial Moment In My Life. There Was A Whole Political Movement Asking Such Questions And Others I Had Never Asked. I Began To Feel Heard In That Movement. But It Was Because My Voice Was Resonating With Other Voices.

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

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.

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

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.

A Life I Didn't Choose Chose Me: Even My Tools Are The Wrong Ones For What I Have To Do.

No Woman Is Really An Insider In The Institutions Fathered By Masculine Consciousness.

In This Disintegrative, Technologically-manic Time, When Public Language Is So Debased, Poetry Continues To Matter Because It's The Art That Reintegrates Words, Speech, Voice, Breath, Music, Bodily Tempo, And The Powers Of The Imagination.

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

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.

I Am A Citizen Of A Country That Has Just Undergone A Thieved Election, A Country Deeply And Dangerously Divided Between Rich And Poor, But Also Between Rich And Middle Class. What I Believe In And What My Government Represents Are Not The Same Thing.

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

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.

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.

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.

There Is No 'the Truth,' 'a Truth'--truth Is Not One Thing, Or Even A System. It Is An Increasing Complexity.

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

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.

Any Woman's Death Diminishes Me.

I Think Many Poets, Including Myself, Write Both For The Voice And For The Page. I Certainly Write For The Person Alone In The Library, Who Pulls Down A Book And It Opens To A Poem. I Am Also Very Conscious Of What It Means To Read These Poems Aloud.

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

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

Telling The Truth

Strangers Are An Endangered Species.

Endangered Species

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.

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

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