Marigris’s Reviews > Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches > Status Update

"When someone said to me, "How do you feel?" or "What do you think?" or asked another direct question, I would recite a poem, and somewhere in that poem would be the feeling, the vital piece of information. It might be a line. It might be an image. The poem was my response."

"We have too often been expected to be all things to all people and speak everyone else's position but our very own."

"And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love."

"The dear that we cannot grow beyond whatever distortions we may find within ourselves keeps us docile and loyal and obedient, externally defined, and leads us to accept many facets of our oppression as women."

"We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings."

"What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?"

"feelings were expected to kneel to thought as women were expected to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden the fact in the same place where we have hidden our power."

"Am i altering your aura, your ideas, your dreams, or am I merely moving you to temporary and reactive action?"

"Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives."

"We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it."