Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be ch… - Adrienne Rich

For a very long time, poems were a way of talking about what I couldn't talk about any other way. And why is it that you're not able to talk about certain things? It's because they are the points of danger, you feel that in the social fabric, you feel there are people who don't want you to raise this question, or if you're a child-to ask this question. That is the threatening place, and of course it becomes a place of great fascination too. I was equipped from a very young age to use language in this way because of how I was brought up, and by whom I was brought up, and the fact that poetry was available to me as a choice, when it might not have been for another seven or ten years if I'd been another child.

One of the things that has been growing in the women's movement in this country-and again, in a society like this it can't, it doesn't happen easily, and it doesn't happen overnight-is the consciousness that we aren't a homogeneous movement, that we are a multi-ethnic movement, that women's experiences across the board are different, even though we share common female experiences. There's been a tremendous enrichment through those understandings, and through the visibility, the leadership, of women of color, and the work of Jewish feminists; that has certainly been part of the last few years.

Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do. (2001)