To be able to ask even the child's astonished question Why do they hate us so? means knowing how to say "we." - Adrienne Rich

instead of poems about experiences I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it. In my earlier poems I told you, as precisely and eloquently as I knew how, about something in the more recent poems something is happening, something has happened to me and, if I have been a good parent to the poem, something will happen to you who read it.

I look everywhere for signs of that fusion I have glimpsed in the women's movement, and most recently in Nicaragua. I turn to Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters or Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy or James Baldwin's Just above My Head; to paintings by Frida Kahlo or Jacob Lawrence; to poems by Dionne Brand or Judy Grahn or Audre Lorde or Nancy Morejón; to the music of Nina Simone or Mary Watkins. This kind of art-like the art of so many others uncanonized in the dominant culture-is not produced as a commodity, but as part of a long conversation with the elders and with the future. (And, yes, I do live and work believing in a future.) Such artists draw on a tradition in which political struggle and spiritual continuity are meshed. Nothing need be lost, no beauty sacrificed. The heart does not turn to a stone. ("Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet" 1983)

(question about democracy) It is more than troubled. I mean, it may be sliding out of our grasp. It goes without saying that this has never been a full democracy. It has always been a selective democracy, offering a few people the full enjoyment of a democratic society, but it has always been repressive toward certain groups, and I don't think that it is less so now. I think we're seeing a failure of the democratic dream and a cynicism toward that dream, so that the dream becomes mere rhetoric in the mouths of politicians and corporations.