Experience is always larger than language. And there's always the next poem, yes. Not necessarily because I feel I've falsified something, but becaus… - Adrienne Rich

The emergence of the Civil Rights movement in the sixties I remember as lifting me out of a sense of personal frustration and hopelessness. Reading James Baldwin's early essays in the fifties had stirred me with a sense that apparently "given" situations like racism could be analyzed and described and that this could lead to action, to change. Racism had been so utter and implicit a fact of my childhood and adolescence, had felt so central among the silences, negations, cruelties, fears, superstitions of my early life, that somewhere among my feelings must have been the hope that if Black people could become free of the immense political and social burdens they were forced to bear, I, too, could become free of all the ghosts and shadows of my childhood, named and unnamed. When "the movement" began, it felt extremely personal to me. And it was often Jews who spoke up for the justice of the cause, Jewish students and civil rights lawyers who travelled South; it was two young Jews who were found murdered with a young Black man in Mississippi: Schwerner, Goodman, Chaney.

It feels to me that I need to know more than I ever did in order to be a poet, that I need to be conscious of what is happening on this planet in ways that I never used to think about. And it's not that that takes the place of the work of the imagination, but that each of us has an imagination that has itself been created by a set of circumstances, some very nourishing, some very negative in terms of becoming blinders-the lacunae, the cartoon-imagery.

(“Do you think there has been a regression during the past ten years from the progress made by the women's movement? Has its momentum slowed, and, if so, will the movement pick up its pace again to what it was in the 1970s? Is there now a sense of exhaustion?”) Well, it very much depends on how you look at the contours of the landscape. An astonishing number of feminist institutions were founded in the seventies. And a lot of movement was going on in existing institutions like universities. But the kind of political retrenchment that began, I think, before Reagan was elected, and in fact led up to his election, inevitably was accompanied by the reassertion of old conservative values about women, and about sexuality. And those attitudes have come down hard.