it’s not even an ad hominem thing about President Clinton, although I find him cowardly and spineless. I am concerned about what it means when we hav… - Adrienne Rich

I believe that poetry asks us to consider the quality of life. Poetry reflects on the quality of life, on us as we are in process on this earth, in our lives, in our relationships, in our communities. It embodies what makes it possible for us to continue as human under the barrage of brute violence, numbing indifference, trivialization, and shallowness that we endure, not to speak of what has come to seem in public life like a total loss on the part of politicians of any desire even to appear consistent, or to appear to adhere to principle.

A long-lived relationship is about so many things. It is such a dense and complex process — always a process — and it's not to be summed up. It's not to be turned into some kind of vignette. If we are serious, we also have to recognize that even the longest and richest and densest relationship must end, and we see it around us. We see it in that inevitability of time's power, if you will.

Those of us who came into activism in the sixties and before, who have continued as engaged citizens through the seventies into the nineties-as welfare rights organizers, as feminists, as members of a critical and oppositional press, as community organizers, as lesbian and gay activists, as anti-racism educators, as new and challenging voices in the labor movement, as builders of battered women's shelters and rape crisis centers, as coalition builders among racial and ethnic communities, as creators of socially responsive art-we did not intend for you or any young people to face at your coming-of-age so manipulated and demoralized a society, at once so fearful and so complacement, as this one. But it's not commiseration I feel for you, standing here, but hope. You have had not just educational privilege of a high order, but the privilege of having a time of youth, when you could try on different selves, without fear of being locked into any one of them. Most people your age in this country don't have a time of youth. And for those young men and women, who will not stand today or any day soon in academic robes under a threatening or a clear blue sky, who were early locked by racism and poverty into manhoods and womanhoods they had no time to choose, I also feel, not despair, but hope.