A Language Is A Map Of Our

Re-vision – The Act Of Looking Back, Of Seeing With Fresh Eyes, Of Entering An Old Text From A New Critical Direction – Is For Woman More Than A Chapter In Cultural History: It Is An Act Of Survival. Until We Understand The Assumptions In Which We Are Drenched We Cannot Know Ourselves. And This Drive To Self-knowledge, For Women, Is More Than A Search For Identity: It Is Part Of Our Refusal Of The Self-destructiveness Of Male-dominated Society.

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.

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.

A Language Is A Map Of Our Failures

Art, Whose Honesty Must Work Through Artifice, Cannot Avoid Cheating Truth.