Poetry gives you permission to put into language what your reality is without sounding like an op-ed. I don’t think I ever get very far from politics… - Alicia Ostriker

The whole point is that the mind-body dichotomy is stupid. It's old, it's philosophically enshrined, but it's stupid. Mind and reason aren't superior to emotion and the body. Read Blake, who was the first poet in the English language able to say this in poetic form. Read Whitman. And men are not in fact particularly rational, nor are women in fact particularly emotional. These are myths. Self-fulfilling myths which need a little alteration. I seek to be a rational and spiritual and emotional and physical creature. So do you, I hope. I'd rather not have someone tell me I'm forbidden to be cerebral because I'm a woman, and I'd rather you didn't think you're forbidden to experience deep feeling because you're a man.

The problem is that Orthodoxy has most of the best lines. This means that feminists, both men and women, will ultimately have to create language as powerful and resonant as the language used in religions today. New liturgy, new psalms, new tales, new parables, new revelations, new scriptures—standing beside the old, drawing from the old, yet embodying alternative spiritual realities. We are very far from this now. Most of the writing that attempts to be progressive is flat and uninspiring.

There was a beautiful stretch of time-the sixties, early seventies-when everybody's musical culture was together, and that was great. But now the shared culture is television commercials.