you never know just how unfree you are until you take that next step. - Alicia Ostriker

I began as a poet in the 1960s, and became a feminist poet in the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, I discovered I was a feminist Jewish poet.

"Poetry makes nothing happen," said W. H. Auden, but there are those of us who disagree. Poetry can tear at the heart with its claws, make the neural nets shiver, flood us with hope, despair, longing, ecstasy, love, anger, terror. It can help us think more lucidly. It can force us to laugh. Poetry can, as Conrad puts it, make us see. It can also, like Rilke's torso of Apollo, tell us that we must change our lives. From time to time, some of us believe, poetry changes the world.

I love the idea that I write poems that are porous. That have openings and loopholes and...invite people in rather than telling them something.