Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination. (p17, III: "What would we create?") - Adrienne Rich

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

A series of poems by a lot of poets have been up in the New York subway. The head of the Transit Authority is a lover of poetry and he decided he wanted "poetry in motion." I was very happy to see that. The same thing has been done in the bus system in San Diego, California, and I think it should be happening everywhere. I think the question of "how do we get people to read poetry?" might be to some extent resolved if people saw more poetry out in the world, places where they go, in just the ordinary public places where everybody has to stand on line, or hang from the strap, waiting, because people would be reading poetry. They would find themselves reading it and absorbing it...I hope many people who saw that poem ("Delta") in the subway thought, "Yes-you can't wrap me up in the story of my life. I am more complicated than you can know."

I believe in the potential, both tapped and blocked, within each one of you. I believe that the responses to the Simi Valley verdict where hundreds of white youth have joined in demonstrations and uprisings in city after city, where citizens of conscience, whatever their, our origins, are being compelled to consider their, our place in all this-I believe that the civil and moral unrest now moving through the inner nervous system of our country, has a chance of catalyzing one of the great shifts in our history. A chance of building not into some hierarchic, monolithic movement, but into many streams of movement, always in touch with and interrogating each other: African American, Arab American, Asian American, Jewish, Latino, white, lesbian, gay and straight: women and men, old and young. My hope, for you and for us all, is that you refuse docility and shallowness and lend your gifts and intelligence to a rising democracy movement here in the United States, sharing power with sisters and brothers at whose expense that power was acquired: learning what can only be taught by those who are not here today.