The problem of the female body is not something that I've studied, but my memoir does treat that theme.

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.

You are made of the same minerals as the rocks--the same water as the sea. You grow in the sun. You breathe air cleansed by trees. When are you going to get the message that you're a part of Nature?

But our mercy has a cost, and it might be our lives.

Men are so completely fools by necessity that he is but a fool in a higher strain of folly who does not confess his foolishness.

We Latin women are liberated from the neck up, not the neck down.

When two people love each other, they do not comply and does not dominate, only complement each other.

When is black America going to forgive white America for slavery?

If you haven't found something worth dying for, you're not fit to live.

A man in the jungle at night, as someone said, may suppose a hyena's growl to be a lion's; but when he hears the lion's growl, he knows damn well it's a lion.

Look-ye, 'tis my Opinion, ev'ry Man cheats in his Way. And he is only honest, who is not discover'd.

When you look at the Lady Gagas of the world, or the Jay-Zs, or the Black Eyed Peas, these are people who have one album release and it's a worldwide one.