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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.

-Adrienne Rich

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We May Feel Bitterly

Adrienne Rich

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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.

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Heterosexuality

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

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

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

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.

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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.

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Heterosexuality Is

Every Poem Breaks A Silence That Had To Be Overcome.

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Whatever Happens

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

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

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Marriage Is Lonelier Than Solitude.

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

Telling The Truth

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.

The Moment Of Change Is The Only Poem.

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

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

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

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.

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!

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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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.

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 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

... 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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

Missing Someone

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.

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.

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.

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

To Do Something Very Common, In My Own Way.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

When I Talk Of Taking A Trip I Mean Forever.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

... 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.

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

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

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

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

Life On The Planet Is Born Of Woman.

Inspirational Life

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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 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.

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John McLaughlin

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