Poetry Is The Way We Help Give

We Have Too Often Been Expected To Speak All Things To All People And Speak Everyone Else's Position But Our Own.

There Are Lesbians, God Knows... If You Came Up Through Lesbian Circles In The Forties And Fifties In New York... Who Were Not Feminist And Would Not Call Themselves Feminists.

[speaking] Is Never Without Fear; Of Visibility, Of The Harsh Light Of Scrutiny And Perhaps Judgment, Of Pain, Of Death. But We Have Lived Through All Of Those Already, In Silence, Except Death. And I Remind Myself All The Time Now, That If I Were To Have Been Born Mute, And Had Maintained An Oath Of Silence My Whole Life For Safety, I Would Still Have Suffered, And I Would Still Die.

If I Didn't Define Myself For Myself, I Would Be Crunched Into Other People's Fantasies For Me And Eaten Alive.

We're Supposed To See "universal" Love As Heterosexual. What I Insist Upon In My Work Is That There Is No Such Thing As Universal Love In Literature.