Art Is Not Living. It Is The

There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women.

As A Black Lesbian Feminist Comfortable With The Many Different Ingredients Of My Identity, And A Woman Committed To Racial And Sexual Freedom From Oppression, I Find I Am Constantly Being Encouraged To Pluck Out Some One Aspect Of Myself And Present This As The Meaningful Whole, Eclipsing Or Denying The Other Parts Of Self. But This Is A Destructive And Fragmenting Way To Live.

And This Is A Grave Responsibility, Projected From Within Each Of Us, Not To Settle For The Convenient, The Shoddy, The Conventionally Expected, Nor The Merely Safe.

For Those Of Us Who Write, It Is Necessary To Scrutinize Not Only The Truth Of What We Speak, But The Truth Of That Language By Which We Speak It.

Stoicism And Silence Does Not Serve Us Nor Our Communities, Only The Forces Of Things As They Are.