Adrienne Rich on mental freedom and engaged poetry
This is what I'm saying in my book too. You could almost change the word "poetry" to "learning." The power of an embodied, engaged approach to free us--as opposed to a literal one of "correct" techniques or formulas. Well worth a few minutes' read. An excerpt from Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Commitment (2007): "Critical discourse about poetry has said little about the daily conditions of our material existence, past and present: how they imprint the life of the feelings, of involuntary human responses--how we glimpse a blur of smoke in the air, look at a pair of shoes in a shop window, at a woman asleep in her car or a group of men on a street corner, how we hear the whir of a helicopter or rain on the roof or music on the radio upstairs, how we meet or avoid the eyes of a neighbor or a stranger. That pressure bends our angle of vision whether we recognize it or not. A great many well-wrought, banal poems, like a great many essays o...