The city and nature, the built stone and the found stone, concrete and slate, poetry addresses them all democratically.

Writing a poem is unwriting a knot, like untying a shoelace that is clubbing your foot.

New formalism is writing with language as flow, like the flow from a dam, running through a desert that has had no rain for decades.

Poetry must speak of others, in order to speak for the poet's imagination, in order to speak of itself; it is slowed down by poetics after its flight is over.

As I grew older - and even when I was younger - it had puzzled me why I continued and continue to be heterosexual.

Poetry has roots, but they are sometimes cut off and still poetry is written.

At a certain point, the struggles with teaching and mothering and so on and so forth, those decline, those lessen.

I'm in my 60s, and a cancer scare just makes you more aware of mortality.

Working women went through a time when they believed that.

[My muse] she's impatient with me, because I don't do what I should do: sit down and write.

Agency over one's sexual self - and the articulation of that kind of agency - might seem transgressive to readers who don't expect it in a woman's text.

Fire and water, logic and reason—those footholds of reality that you mortals hold so near and dear become like so much mist on the plains of the dreamscape.

Sooner or later there will always be a cost for "Free Stuff

I'd like to thank the committee that brought this event about. It was an equal endeavor. They did the food decorations and reservations and I did the traffic flow.

There's no art where there's no fee.

The task of resisting our own oppression does not relieve us of the responsibility of acknowledging our complicity in the oppression of others.

Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement. Think on paper and write them down!

You don't order someone to polish your shoes one day and call them 'sister' the next.

When I write, I wear earplugs. I don't want to be self-conscious. I don't want to be thinking about the fact that I'm thinking about it. I just want to be in it. It's one element of hypnosis.

I have always tried...to lay before the colored race a cross section of it's own life, to view the colored heart from close range.

When the rational mind is shut off, we have the possibility of intuition.