Quotes About Expression

I am the androgyne.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

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.

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

To do something very common, in my own way.

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.

It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment--that explodes in poetry.

Most women have not even been able to touch this anger, except to drive it inward like a rusted nail.

She had to possess the courage to enter, through language, states which most people deny or veil with silence.

I write for the still-fragmented parts in me, trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this, I write for them as well.

but from here on I want more crazy mourning, more howl, more keening -from "A Woman Dead in Her Forties

One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

A language is a map of our failures

We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege

Poetry is, among other things, a criticism of language.

Any woman who has moved from the playing fields of male discourse into the realm where women are developing our own descriptions of the world knows the extraordinary sense of shedding, as it were, the encumbrance of someone else's baggage, of ceasing to translate.

You've kissed my hair to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem, I say, a poem I wanted to show someone… and I laugh and fall dreaming again of the desire to show you to everyone I love, to move openly together in the pull of gravity

You grieve in loneliness, and if I understand you fuck in loneliness.

But it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat.

We write from the marrow of our bones.

in every room, the furniture reflects you larger than life, or dwindling

I don't think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope