Most biographers of women still fail to recognize that a woman's central relationship can be to her work, even as lovers come and go. ("Raya Dunayevs… - Adrienne Rich

I think politics can seem a burden when we feel alone and powerless against enormous and impersonal forces out there in the public realm. The late years of the Vietnam War when a lot of poets were giving antiwar readings was a very crucial time for me. In the 1960s, when poetry was very much part of public life, I began trying to make connections for myself between the havoc being wreaked by my government on a small country thousands of miles away, which I and so many of my friend were protesting, and the relations between human beings within my country, especially the relations between women and men. That kind of synthesis really wasn't happening yet in the public sphere, but I was trying to make that synthesis in my poetry-which was the only way I knew how to do it.

I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

At different times in my life I have wanted to push away one or the other burden of inheritance, to say merely I am a woman; I am a lesbian. If I call myself a Jewish lesbian, do I thereby try to shed some of my southern gentile white woman's culpability? If I call myself only through my mother, is it because I pass more easily through a world where being a lesbian often seems like outsiderhood enough?