Circles on the Water

Poetry

The Crooked Inheritance

Colors Passing Through Us

The Art of Blessing the Day

Early Grrrl

What Are Big Girls Made Of?

Mars and Her Children

Available Light

My Mother’s Body

Stone, Paper, Knife

The Moon Is Always Female

The Twelve-Spoked Wheel Flashing

Living in the Open

To Be of Use

4-Telling (
with Robert Hershon, Emmett Jarrett, Dick Lourie
)

Hard Loving

Breaking Camp

Novels

Body of Glass

Sex Wars

The Third Child

Storm Tide (
with Ira Wood
)

City of Darkness, City of Light

The Longings of Women

He, She and It

Summer People

Gone to Soldiers

Fly Away Home

Braided Lives

Vida

The High Cost of Living

Woman on the Edge of Time

Small Changes

Dance the Eagle to Sleep

Going Down Fast

Other

The Last White Class: A Play (
with Ira Wood
)

Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt: Essays

Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now: An Anthology

The Earth Shines Secretly: A Book of Days (
with paintings by Nell Blaine
)

An introduction might be a kind of envoi: Go little book out into the world and wheedle your way into the lives of strangers like a stray kitten. However, a selected poems is not little; and Go big fat book out into the world and impose upon strangers like a loose elephant, lacks appeal. An introduction could be an apologia, but how redundant when the poems already coax, lecture, lull, seduce, exhort, denounce. As a poet I am bound to the attempt to capture in amber the mayflies of the moment and render them into the only jewels I have to give you. I guess I will settle for saying what I imagine I am doing.

Usually the voice of the poems is mine. Rarely do I speak through a mask or persona. The experiences, however, are not always mine, and although my major impulse to autobiography has played itself out in poems rather than novels, I have never made a distinction in working up my own experience and other people’s. When I am writing, I’m not aware of the difference, to be honest. I suppose that is why I have never considered myself a confessional poet. In either case I am often pushing the experience beyond realism.

I imagine that I speak for a constituency, living and dead, and that I give utterance to energy, experience, insight, words flowing from many lives. I have always desired that my poems work for others. “To be of use” is the title of one of my favorite poems and one of my best-known books—now out of print as a result of the
Thor
decision by the IRS to tax publisher’s backlists.

What I mean by being of use is not that the poems function as agitprop or are didactic, although some of them are. I have no more hesitation than Pope or Hesiod did to write in that mode as well as in many others. The notion that poetry with a conscious rather than an unconscious politics is impermissible or impure is a modern heresy of advantage only to those who like just fine the way things are going. We are social animals and we live with and off and on each other. You would have had great trouble explaining to Sophocles, Virgil, Catullus, Chaucer, Dryden, Wordsworth, Shelley, Arnold, Whitman, Blake, Goethe, that
poetry refers only to other poetry and that poets are strange and special people who have no social connections, social interests, social duties.