Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, midd… - Adrienne Rich

If it is the present that calls us to activism, it is history that must nourish our choices and commitment.

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.

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.