I did not know that the rules about these things were different if you were female. I did not know that 'poetess' was an insult, and that I myself would some day be called one. I did not know that to be told I had transcended my gender would be considered a compliment. I didn't know - yet - that black was compulsory. All of that was in the future. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me - yet - the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.

The day I became a poet was a sunny day of no particular ominousness. I was walking across the football field, not because I was sports-minded or had plans to …

As for my birth month, a detail of much interest to poets, obsessed as they are with symbolic systems of all kinds: I was not pleased, during my childhood, to …

I became a poet at the age of sixteen. I did not intend to do it. It was not my fault.

America is now wholly given over to a d--d mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash …

As the little boy said when asked if he wanted to be a lawyer like his mother, 'Oh no, that's women's work.' (Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions)

A man is free to go up as high as he can reach up to; but I, with all my style and pep, can't get a man my equal because a girl is always judged by her mother.