I guess what I'm searching for always is a way of staying linked to the past, pulling out of it whatever you can use, and continuing to move on. - Adrienne Rich

I was admittedly young and trying to educate myself, but I was also doing something that is dangerous: I was flirting with identity.

this is an ignorance that is damaging both to women and to men. Ignorance of the history of more than half the human species. And therefore the history of the entire species is distorted. In some ways we have come a long way; in other ways, I think, not at all. And then outside of the sphere of the kind of education where you would expect to find a certain liberal stance toward feminism, the issue becomes what women have any education available to them at all. Thinking on a global level, how early do women leave school, if they've gone to school at all? The illiteracy rate among women overall is rapidly on the increase. And so it's not just a question of, do we know our history, but do we know how to read, how to write? Do we know that there is such a thing as history, that we can be part of it, makers of it?

Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture. (2001)