I know that in the rest of my life, the next half century or so, every aspect of my identity will have to be engaged. The middle-class white girl tau… - Adrienne Rich

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.

Our ears, like it or not, take in so much in a day. Maybe some North American ears have trouble with poetry because of the noise from an aggressively voiced ruling ethos—its terminology of war, success, national security, winning and losing, ownership, merchandising, canned information, canned laughter. Poetry can be direct, it can be colloquial, it can be abrupt or angry, but it’s not that vacuous noise; it wants to unseat that kind of language, play other kinds of sound tracks.

I think we're at a very interesting watershed, because I have been seeing and noting a tremendous renaissance of poetry in the United States over the past ten to twenty years nourished by the voices of many groups which had been largely silenced before that-by the voices of women, the voices of people of color, the voices of gay men and lesbians, the voices of working-class, white Americans. There is a seething, burgeoning poetry out there, but it's many poetries, and it's coming from many cultures and many communities.