Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination. (p17, III: "What would we create?") - Adrienne Rich

As feminists, we need to be looking above all for the greatness and sanity of ordinary women, and how these women have collectively waged resistance. In searching that territory we find something better than individual heroines: the astonishing continuity of women's imagination of survival, persisting through the great and little deaths of daily life.

For myself it is an ever-present challenge to draw lines of connection between personal feelings and their social dimensions, “the body’s pain and the pain on the streets” to recognize that an economic system can impact on human sensibility—Marx’s idea that exploitative relations of production end by affecting all human relations, the most private and intimate included. These are finally not just ideas, they become our feelings. And it’s in feelings that poetry is rooted.

Dear and cherished graduates: Remember the youth of your generation. Remember all the youths-and the parents who are not here today nor at any commencement in the land. Remember that our true democracy cannot come to birth without their participation. Nor without yours.