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 commen… - Adrienne Rich

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

White men need a history that does not simply "include" peoples of color and white women, but that shows the process by which the arrogance of hierarchy and the celebration of violence have reached a point of destructiveness almost out of control. In other words, white men need to start questioning the text handed down from father to son, the dominator's version.

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.