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… - Adrienne Rich

we teachers used to talk a lot about who fails the teacher or the student-when you have a classroom situation which is rigged entirely against the student, or in which the teacher is too ignorant to teach. Not ignorant of grammar, but ignorant of the students, ignorant of their culture. So, I was thinking very much about our failures, the map of our failures, we who consider ourselves so possessed of language, so articulate.

There’s a poem from the mid-1950s in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, “From Morning Glory to Petersburg”—titles from an encyclopedia volume—that suggests the effort to ask, as a conscious strategy, how do you make livable meaning out of separate bits of classified information? How to live with “facts” you can’t integrate? Well, one way was to integrate them is through poetry.

Where every public decision has to be justified in the scales of corporate profits, poetry unsettles these apparently self-evident propositions-not through ideology, but by its very presence and ways of being, its embodiment of states of longing and desire. (Preface)