I've said that "American Jews" have paid an intellectual and spiritual price for the narrowing of sight demanded by conformity and reliance on Israel… - Adrienne Rich

I’ve known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise? The philosopher Hannah Arendt writes about the concept of “public happiness”—the sense of being a participant, a citizen, of sharing the power to create collectively. She says that’s what the framers of the U.S. constitution really intended in saying that “men” are endowed with the inalienable right to the “pursuit of happiness.” The idea becomes more tantalizing in a society where most citizens feel individually and collectively disempowered—as just now in the U.S. But the issue of happiness turns up also in the poetry of Charles Olson, and in my poem, “Camino Real,” I have a dialogue with both Olson and Oppen, in which I say, “Why measure? It’s itself the measure.” It occurs to me now that Whitman was not simply inventing an ideal United States; he was trying to show what public happiness would feel like, along with public grief and mourning as in his Civil War poems.

women cannot become liberated one by one. But individual revolt is not simply futile.

What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other's despair into hope?--
You yourself must change it.--
what would it feel like to know
your country was changing?--
You yourself must change it.--
Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
what would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair?