Poems Are Like Dreams: In Them You

My Children Cause Me The Most Exquisite Suffering Of Which I Have Any Experience. It Is The Suffering Of Ambivalence: The Murderous Alternation Between Bitter Resentment And Raw-edged Nerves, And Blissful Gratification And Tenderness. Sometimes I Seem To Myself, In My Feelings Toward These Tiny Guiltless Beings, A Monster Of Selfishness And Intolerance.

Re-vision -- The Act Of Looking Back, Of Seeing With Fresh Eyes, Of Entering An Old Text From A New Critical Direction - Is For Women More Than A Chapter In Cultural History: It Is An Act Of Survival.

If The Imagination Is To Transcend And Transform Experience It Has To Question, To Challenge, To Conceive Of Alternatives, Perhaps To The Very Life You Are Living At The Moment.

A Revolutionary Poem Will Not Tell You Who Or When To Kill, What And When To Burn, Or Even How To Theorize. It Reminds You... Where And When And How You Are Living And Might Live, It Is A Wick Of Desire.

Whatever Is Unnamed, Undepicted In Images, Whatever Is Omitted From Biography, Censored In Collections Of Letters, Whatever Is Misnamed As Something Else, Made Difficult-to-come-by, Whatever Is Buried In The Memory By The Collapse Of Meaning Under An Inadequate Or Lying Language - This Will Become, Not Merely Unspoken, But Unspeakable.