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| CONTENTS |
Eloise Stonborough: We are writing in a tradition which privileges the impersonal, the objective, and the rational. How can one reject the “I” when even to say “I am a woman, I am a lesbian, and I am a poet” can seem impossible? To write personally as a woman is to be “confessional” but a man is “insightful” or “soul-searching.” Poetry does not have to be political to be a political act. I believe we are obligated as queer women to speak out and to work to have our voices enter the cultural debate. (Ms.)
Adrienne Rich: “Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.” (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence)
Srikanth Reddy: “Everything about poetry is strange to me, including the simple fact of its existence.”
Jill Johnston: “Man is completely out of phase with nature. Nature is woman. Man is the intruder. The man who re-attunes himself with nature is the man who de-mans himself or eliminates himself as man.” (Lesbian Nation)
Virginia Woolf: “And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.” (The Waves)
Adrienne Rich: “Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience. Our future depends on the sanity of each of us, and we have a profound stake, beyond the personal, in the project of describing our reality as candidly and fully as we can to each other.” (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence)
