Adrienne Rich says

I want a kind of poetry that doesn’t bother either to praise or curse at parties or leaders, even systems, but that reveals how we are – inwardly as well as outwardly – under conditions of great imbalance and abuse of material power. How are our private negotiations and sensibilities swayed and bruised, how do we make love – in the most intimate and in the largest sense – how (in every sense) do we feel? How do we try to make sense? I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving as state power. Without grappling with the messenger from the barricades, our poems atrophy, get swallowed up into that nexus of euphemism and obliquity obscuring violence….

Poetry can’t give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do that. To read, to listen, to write, to feel, to fear, to draw courage from others, to take risks, to wrestle with contradictions, to engage with others – this is, indeed, the verb without tenses, the conversation without an end….

I have never believed that poetry is an escape from history, and I do not think it is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary….

I know that “capitalism” is an unfashionable word. “Democracy,” “free enterprise,” market economy” are the banners now floating above our economic system. Still, as a poet, I choose to sieve up old, sunken words, heave them, dripping with silt, turn them over, and bring them into the air of the present. 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.