...you Look At Me Like An Emergency

There Is Nothing Revolutionary Whatsoever About The Control Of Women's Bodies By Men. The Woman's Body Is The Terrain On Which Patriarchy Is Erected.

Despair, When Not The Response To Absolute Physical And Moral Defeat Is, Like War, The Failure Of Imagination.

To Write As If Your Life Depended On It; To Write Across The Chalkboard, Putting Up There In Public The Words You Have Dredged; Sieved Up In Dreams, From Behind Screen Memories, Out Of Silence-- Words You Have Dreaded And Needed In Order To Know You Exist.

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.

For Now, Poetry Has The Capacity - In Its Own Ways And By Its Own Means - To Remind Us Of Something We Are Forbidden To See.