We don't shed racism or sexism because we're in a liberation movement unless we struggle hard to try to create bridges, to find out where our common … - Adrienne Rich

Essentially poetry, if it is poetry, does not lend itself to simple readings, to oversimplifications — though people may try to read it that way. It seems to me that the essential nature of a poem is that there is ambivalence and ambiguity quivering underneath.

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.

The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken? (p150)