One of the insidious rhetorical devices of the U.S. Right has been to claim (for example) that empathy with others is merely “liberal guilt” or “poli… - 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.

(What do you think when you look around this festival and you see Japanese American poets, Chinese American poets, Puerto Rican poets, poets from the white working class?) I feel enormous joy and exhilaration. This is so different from the poetry world into which I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s. That was a world dominated by a few major figures, mostly from a certain class and of course male: Pound, Williams, Eliot, Stevens. I was saying to a young man, a poet working here, "Your generation doesn't have to look at the field of poetry as a hierarchy. You can draw from this enormously rich cluster of poetries, and you can enrich yourself from so many kinds that this is a wholly different situation than we had in the 1940s and 1950s."

poetry is always being created anew, in new places, by unforetold hands and voices. In this, it is like the many movements against demoralizing power. We don't know where either will come from. This is a story without an end. (Preface)