I'd Call It Love If Love Didn't

Re-vision – The Act Of Looking Back, Of Seeing With Fresh Eyes, Of Entering An Old Text From A New Critical Direction – Is For Woman More Than A Chapter In Cultural History: It Is An Act Of Survival. Until We Understand The Assumptions In Which We Are Drenched We Cannot Know Ourselves. And This Drive To Self-knowledge, For Women, Is More Than A Search For Identity: It Is Part Of Our Refusal Of The Self-destructiveness Of Male-dominated Society.

In Order To Live A Fully Human Life We Require Not Only Control Of Our Bodies (though Control Is A Prerequisite); We Must Touch The Unity And Resonance Of Our Physicality, Our Bond With The Natural Order, The Corporeal Grounds Of Our Intelligence.

In The States, There Has Been, Compared To The Sixties And Seventies, A Huge Retrenchment - Not Just In Poetry - Into The Personal. A Withdrawal From Thinking In Terms Of Social And Collective Values, Needs And Solutions. The Consciousness-raising Groups Of The Women's Movement, For Instance, Becoming "support-groups" Or Therapy Groups.

If The Imagination Is To Transcend And Transform Experience It Has To Question, To Challenge, To Conceive Of Alternatives, Perhaps To The Very Life You Are Living At The Moment.

Can Individual Psychic Wounds Really Heal In An Abusive And Fragmented Society? Audre Lorde Has A Poem Which Begins, "what Do We Want From Each Other/ After We Have Told Our Stories?" Where Do We Go To Explore Our Stake With Others In Such A Society?