At night when everyone is silent and everything is still, I lie in the darkness of my windowless room, the place where they exile me from the community of their heart, and search the unmoving blackness to see if I can find my way home. I tell myself stories, write poems, record my dreams. In my journal I write—I belong in this place of words. This is my home. This dark, bone black inner cave where I am making a world for myself.
—bell hooks, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood
I read poems. I write. That is my destiny. Standing on the edge of the cliff about to fall into the abyss, I remember who I am. I am a young poet, a writer. I am here to make words. I have the power to pull myself back from death—to keep myself alive.
—bell hooks, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood
When you say “I would die for you” to those you love, the truth of those words may be not that you give your physical life but that you are willing to die to the past and be born again in the present where you can live fully and freely—where you can give us the love we need.
—bell hooks, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
— Adrienne Rich, from “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”
I wanted to choose words that even you
would have to be changed by
— Adrienne Rich, from “Implosions”
When I know what people think of me
I am plunged into my loneliness. The grey
hat bought earlier sickens.
I have no purpose no longer distinguishable.
A feeling like being choked
enters my throat.
— Robert Creeley, “The End”
When you go, space closes over like water behind you,
Do not look back: there is nothing outside you,
Space is only time visible in a different way,
Places we love we can never leave.
— Ivan V. Lalic, from “Places We Love” (translated by Francis R. Jones)
Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.
— Anne Sexton, from “The Truth the Dead Know”
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.
—Wendell Berry, from “How To Be a Poet”
Concerning the death of Gertrude Stein: she came out of a deep coma to ask her companion Alice Toklas, “Alice, Alice, what is the answer?” Her companion replied, “There is no answer.” Gertrude Stein continued, “Well, then, what is the question?” and fell back dead.
—Susan Sontag, from Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
I embrace my solitude as a beautiful gift; I will become beautiful through it!
—Susan Sontag, from Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963
My night awake
staring at the broad rough jewel
the copper roof across the way
thinking of the poet
yet unborn in this dark
who will be the throat of these hours.
No. Of those hours.
Who will speak these days,
if not I,
if not you?
—Muriel Rukeyser, from “The Speed of Darkness”
Water goes down to tomorrow
making its children I hear their unborn voices
I am working out the vocabulary of my silence.
—Muriel Rukeyser, from “The Speed of Darkness”
