Great Throughts Treasury

"Flags are blossoming now where little else is blossoming and I am bent on fathoming what it means to love my country. The history of this earth and the bones within it? Minerals, traces, rumors I am made from, morsel, minuscule fiber, one woman like and unlike so many, fooled as to her destiny, the scope of her task? One citizen like and unlike so many, touched and untouched in passing? A patriot is not a weapon. A patriot us one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being, for the soul of his country."

"For every bandaged wound I?ll scrape another open."

"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."

"Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal."

"Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust."

"Her choice to be, not only a poet but a woman who explored her own mind, without any of the guidelines of orthodoxy. To say yes to her powers was not simply a major act of nonconformity in the nineteenth century; even in our own time it has been assumed that Emily Dickinson, not patriarchal society, was the problem. The ore we come to recognize the unwritten and written laws and taboos underpinning patriarchy, the less problematical, surely, will seem the methods she chose."

"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."

"How can I reconcile this passion with our modesty your Calvinist heritage my girlhood frozen into forms. How can I go on this mission without you? You, who might have told me everything you feel is true?"

"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?"

"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."

"How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons."

"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 shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention."

"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."

"I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see."

"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."

"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"

"I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding."

"I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines. Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem - just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc."

"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 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."

"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 came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail."

"I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt."

"I did not then understand that we?the women of that academic community?as in so many middle-class communities of the period?were expected to fill both the part of the Victorian Lady of Leisure, the Angel in the House, and also of the Victorian cook, scullery maid, laundress, governess, and nurse. I only sensed that there were false distractions sucking at me, and I wanted desperately to strip my life down to what was essential. June"

"I don?t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope."

"I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary."

"I don?t want to know wreckage, dreck, and waste, but these are the materials and so are the slow lift of the moon?s belly. Over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild tree-frogs calling in another season, light and music still pouring over our fissured, cracked terrain. If you had known me once you?d still know me though in a different light and life. This is no place you ever knew me. But it would not surprise you to find me here, walking in fog, the sweep of the great ocean eluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as always I fix on the land. I am stuck to earth? these are not the roads you knew me by. But the woman driving, walking, watching for life and death is the same."

"I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence."

"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."

"I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them."

"I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope."

"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."

"I don't want to hear how he beat her after the earthquake, tore up her writing, threw the kerosene lantern into her face waiting like an unbearable mirror of his own. I don't want to hear how she finally ran from the trailer how he tore the keys from her hands, jumped into the truck and backed it into her. I don't want to think how her guesses betrayed her - that he meant well, that she was really the stronger and ought not to leave him to his own apparent devastation. I don't want to know wreckage, dreck and waste, but these are the materials and so are the slow lift of the moon's belly over wreckage, dreck, and waste, wild tree-frogs calling in another season, light and music still pouring over our fissured, cracked terrain."

"I have a notion that genius knows itself; that Dickinson chose her seclusion, knowing she was exceptional and knowing what she needed."

"I fling unconscious tendrils of belief, like slender green threads, across statements such as these, statements made so unequivocally, which have no tone or shadow of tentativeness. I build them into the mosaic of my world. I allow my universe to change in minute, significant ways, on the basis of things you have said to me, of my trust in you."

"I feel more helpless with you than without you."

"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."

"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."

"I have chosen to use the terms lesbian existence and lesbian continuum because the word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and our continuing creation of the meaning of that existence I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range?through each woman?s life and throughout history?of woman-identified experience; not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. If we expand it to embrace many more forms of primary intensity between and among women, including the sharing of a rich inner life, the bonding against male tyranny, the giving and receiving of practical and political support; if we can also hear in it such associations as marriage resistance and the ?haggard? behavior identified by Mary Daly (obsolete meanings ?intractable,? ?willful,? ?wanton,? and ?unchaste? a woman reluctant to yield to wooing?)?we begin to grasp breadths of female history and psychology that have lain out of reach as a consequence of limited, mostly clinical, definitions of ?lesbianism.?"

"I know you are reading this later poetry, before leaving the 'office with the dazzling yellow lamp and the window in the darkness faded into apathy of a building in the quiet after the hour traffic. I know you are reading this poem standing in the bookstore far from the ocean on a gray day of spring, scattered snowflakes pushed through huge areas of plains around you. I know you are reading this poem in a room where so much has happened that you cannot stand where the clothes lying on the bed in stagnant heaps and open suitcase talking about leaks but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem as the underground train loses speed before climbing the stairs toward a new kind of love that life has never given you. I know you are reading this poem in the light of the TV where silent images jump and glide while you wait telenotizie the intifada. I know you are reading this poem in a waiting room of eyes that meet yes and no, of identity with strangers. I know you are reading this poem under the neon light in the boredom and fatigue of young people out of the game, who get out of the game when they are still too young. I know you are reading this poem with a view not good, thick glasses magnify these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious. I know you are reading this poem as you go and come by the stove, heat milk, a baby crying on the shoulder, a book in hand because life is short and you too are thirsty. I know you are reading this poem not written in your language guessing some words while others continue to read them and I want to know what these words. I know you are reading this poem as you hear something, torn between anger and hope starting to do the job again you cannot refuse. I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else to see where you landed, completely naked."

"I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons."

"I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed and the open valise speaks of flight but you cannot leave yet."

"I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope."

"I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are. I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn between bitterness and hope turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse. I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read there where you have landed, stripped as you are."

"I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious."

"I long to create something."

"I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men."

"I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male fear of women and of women's sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men really fear, not that they will have women's sexual appetites forced on them, or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether, that men could be allowed sexual and emotional-therefore economic-access to women only on women's terms, otherwise being left on the periphery of the matrix."

"I never asked you to explain that act of violence what dazed me was our ignorance of our will to hurt each other."

"I suddenly see the world as no longer viable: you are out there burning the crops with some new sublimate This morning you left the bed we still share and went out to spread impotence upon the world. I hate you. I hate the mask you wear, your eyes assuming a depth they do not possess, drawing me into the grotto of your skull the landscape of bone I hate your words they make you think of fake revolutionary bills crisp imitation parchment they sell at battlefields. Last night, in this room, weeping I asked you: what are you feeling? Do you feel anything? Now in the torsion of your body as you defoliate the fields we lived from I have your answer."