cont.

2009-11-30T21:17:00.001-08:00

"We should be making a determined effort to move forward in the creation of a continental culture that understands itself as a totality and a novelty whose only concern is developing forms of existence that provide everyone involved with a sense of integrity and identity." —Vine Deloria Jr., Spirit & Reason

2009-06-11T21:34:00.000-07:00

"What is of great intellectual importance here is the non-separability of experience from being, not the false couplet of theory and experience where the two exist in opposition, with one in subordination or perceived more authentic, depending on your paradigmatic approach. Language as a representative system, and not a transformative practice, attempts to represent the world instead of invent and create it. This fragmenting leads directly to the dissociation of experience from worldview and theory. It is a reductive process in which things are reduced and reduced until there is nothing, not even the memory of existence."
-- Reid Gómez, The Storyteller's Escape: Sovereignty & Worldview, in Reading Native American Women

"The myth, these rituals, are too valuable to be imposed."
-- Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel

2009-05-04T07:13:00.001-07:00

"It is not enough that you understand me. I would rather be believed. Imagine a kind of love that has no Greek word for it and then imagine that we could make a system in which all connections are made of this. Imagine a human system like culture that could make the public private and the private okay." -- Anne Boyer.

Feminist Poet forum at Delirious Hem. I'm up on Thursday.

2009-02-09T21:50:00.001-08:00

"Western Myth: Abstract thought, discourse, is a sign of superior intelligence.

....

How devoid contemporary life is of spirituality; so devoid, that people seek it in the wrong ways in the wrong places, invariably going unfulfilled and mystified as to why. And yet, few, if any, suspect that this great void in their lives is a major portion of the price they are paying for the racism that taints everything American--every aspiration, dream, and religious credo."

--Wanda Coleman, to Truong Tran, in Letters to Poets

2009-01-26T16:33:00.000-08:00

Female history is always destabilized by whatever guy is now watching the line of women parading by. It's maddening but those guys will never change. We have to think differently. ....I think females need to write new fictions to hold their truths..... We have to set each other up better all the time and the terms of the world are always inadequate to women's true accomplishments.....The feminine line means that above all women mustn't be contemptuous of themselves. Just when the last thing going on is one's purported femininity, it erupts like a big bow. We're just so many things. I distrust my own jargon, my abandoning of the feminine for the female. I guess I was preferring sex over gender, but later thinking how arrogant to pretend not to be feminine. For anyone really. Why is the feminine the thing to hate. Something men, or mothers made to control girls. Surely it can free us too, then in some homeopathic way. I often forget words, that's why I like holes. All this quiet diving through the dictionary and a bird comes up tweeting.
-- Eileen Myles, to Jennifer Firestone, in Letters to Poets

2009-01-17T10:17:00.000-08:00

So that, a few years later, when I was asked to articulate a poetics for some important publication, I could only write: THE REQUIREMENTS OF OUR LIFE IS THE FORM OF OUR ART. Knowing for certain no one would know what I was talking about, what that meant. Or that the "us" was -- the women.
--Diane di Prima, Recollections of My Life as a Woman: the New York Years