Quotes About Power

Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.The beak that grips her, she becomes.

They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide...?

As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.

How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation." ( Defy the Space That Separates , The Nation, October 7, 1996)

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude.

We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege

When I try to speak my throat is cut and, it seems, by his hand The sounds I make are prehuman, radical the telephone is always ripped-out and he sleeps on Yet always the tissue grows over, white as silk hardly a blemish maybe a hieroglyph for scream Child, no wonder you never wholly trusted your keepers

If you are curious and open to the life around you, if you are disturbed as to how, by, and against whom wealth and political power is held and used, if you sense there must be good reasons for your unease, if your curiosity and openness drive you toward wanting to act with others, to "do something," you have much in common with the writers of the three essays in Manifesto.

A thinking woman sleeps with monsters

and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.

This is the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you.

She died a famous woman denying her wounds denying her wounds came from the same source as her power.

Poetry never stood a chance of standing outside history.

The moment the feeling enters the body is political.

There is nothing North Americans seem to fear so much as manipulation, probably because at some level we know that we belong to a deeply manipulative system.

I want to crawl into her for refuge lay my head in the space between her breast and shoulder abnegating power for love as women have done

The world tells me I am its creature I am raked by eyes brushed by hands I want to crawl into her for refuge lay my head in the space between her breast and shoulder abnegating power for love as women have done or hiding from power in her love like a man I refuse these givens the splitting between love and action I am choosing not to suffer uselessly and not to use her I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence

Reading and writing aren't sacred yet people have been killed as if they were

When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.