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 on poetry and poetics, are written as if such pressures didn't exist.  But this only reveals their existence...

"But when poetry lays its hand on our shoulder, as Yitzhak Laor's poem did for David Zonsheine, we are, to an almost physical degree, touched and moved. The imagination's roads open before us, giving the lie to that slammed and bolted door, that razor-wired fence, that brute dictum 'There is no alternative'...

"What's pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images--is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism--a stunted language?  Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference?  The great muscle of the unconstricted throat?

"I'd like to suggest this: If there's a line to be drawn, it's not so much between secularism and belief as between those for whom language has metaphoric density and those for whom it is merely formulaic--to be used for repression, manipulation, empty certitudes to ensure obedience.

"And such a line can also be drawn between ideologically obedient hack verse and an engaged poetics that endures the weight of the unknown, the untracked, the unrealized..."

 ("Poetry and Commitment" was first presented at the 2006 Conference on Poetry and Poetics at Stirling University, Scotland.  Rich read a briefer version upon acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contributions to American Letters)

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