It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and plainful. ("When We Dead Awaken: Writ… - 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.

I think there are many different kinds of dread for many different kinds of people. I think that more and more people feel uncared for, feel that their lives are not only unvalued but meaningless, feel that though they may care for their lives, no one else will, feel that the only way that they can protect their survival and interests is by the gun. I'm afraid that many people feel an enormous desperation which plays into the propaganda of hate.

The struggle for Black civil rights had such clarity about it for me: I knew that segregation was wrong, that unequal opportunity was wrong, I knew that segregation in particular was more than a set of social and legal rules-it meant that even "decent" white people lived in a network of lies and arrogance and moral collusion.