it came to me that every one of those piles of corpses, mountains of shoes and clothing had contained, simply, individuals, who had believed, as I no… - Adrienne Rich

An enormous amount is happening globally-different kinds of struggle in different countries, in different societies. When you look at South Africa, there's enormous leadership by women. Black women in South Africa are maintaining and creating a structure. In that violence-ridden society, in the midst of revolution, they are creating childcare centers, soup kitchens, planting gardens, keeping things going on that human level. Now I don't think that's just women doing the service work of the world; those women are also leaders of their communities. We could talk about feminism in the Philippines, in Latin America, in the Caribbean, not a monolithic global movement but many movements, all over the world, contending within and against many different cultures. The United States movement is only a small part of the picture.

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.

Dark Fields of the Republic and Midnight Salvage were written during the final decade of the twentieth century and against the grain of their society. The economic and technological expansion, with the terrible human and environmental prices paid, were (and are) accelerating, while at the same time language itself, the medium of my art, was deteriorating.