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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
... 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.
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.
... 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?
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.