To tell all the truth and tell it straight has become the program of most women poets. The truth is mysterious enough, and we are ignorant enough of … - 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.

I believe that the flood of writing by eloquent women in our own time will alter the mainstream of American poetry.

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.