Rich's 1994 Interview from The Progressive

[A]s she puts it in her early 1980s poem Sources, she is a woman with a mission, not to win
prizes/but to change the laws of history.
...here its the censorship of who wants to listen to you, anyway?--of carrying on this art in a
country where it is perceived as so elite or effete or marginal that it has nothing to do with the hard
core of things. That goes hand in hand with an attitude about politics, which is that the average
citizen, the regular American, cant understand poetry and also cant understand politics, that both are
somehow the realms of experts, that we are spectators of politics, rather than active subjects. I dont
believe either is true.
Poetry in America became either answerable to a certain ideology--as it was, Puritanism--focusing on
certain themes, expressive of certain attitudes, or it became identified in the Nineteenth Century with
a certain femininity, the feminization of literature, what Nathaniel Hawthorne called that horde of
scribbling women. In What Is Found There, I suggest that in carrying out the genocide of the
indigenous people, you had to destroy the indigenous poetry. The mainstream American tradition
depends on the extirpation of memory and the inability of so many white American poets to deal with
what it meant to be a North American poet--Whitman, of course, the great exception in his way, and in
her own way Dickinson, so different but so parallel. And yet that still doesnt altogether explain it.
Instead of political poetry, we might want to say poetry of witness, poetry of dissent, poetry that is the
voice of those and on behalf of those who are generally unheard.
Were talking about something really large: How does change come about at the end of this century, at
this particular time that were finding ourselves in? I still believe very strongly that there isnt going
to be any kind of movement joined, any mass movement, that does not involve leadership by women-I dont mean only leadership by women or leadership by only women but leadership by women. This
is the only way that I see major change approaching.
Womens liberation is a very beautiful phrase; feminism sounds a little purse-mouthed. Its also
become sort of meaningless. If we use the phrase womens liberation, the question immediately arises,
Liberation from what? Liberation for what? Liberation is a very serious word, as far as Im
concerned.
Its not that I dont believe in introspection, in the recovery of buried memory, in the things that
therapy is supposed to do, but--and I saw this most vividly in the womens movement--therapy,
twelve-step groups, support-groups so-called, seemed to be the only kind of organization going on in
small groups, in communities; they seemed to be the only thing that people were doing. I compared
this to the early consciousness-raising of the womens liberation movement where, yes, women met in
groups to speak about their experience as women but with the purpose of going out and taking action.
It was not enough simply to put everything in the pot and let it sizzle. The solutions in these therapy
groups are purely personal. Its not that I havent seen activists who became ineffectual because of the
failure to attend to their feelings. Im not saying write all that off. But therapy, self-help became the
great American pastime.
I wouldnt say it isnt a good use of my time because its really at the very core of who I am. I have to
do this. This is really how I know and how I probe the world. I think that some of those voices come
from still residual ideas about poetry not making a difference. I happen to think it makes a huge
difference. Other peoples poetry has made a huge difference in my life. It has changed the way I saw

the world. It has changed the way I felt the world. It has changed the way I have understood another
human being. So I really dont have basic doubts about that. And Im also fortunate to be able t
participate with my writing in activism. But still there are voices in my head. The other thing is that at
the age I am now and the relative amount of visibility that I have, that gives you a certain kind of
power, and its really important to keep thinking about how to use that power. So I just try to keep that
internal dialogue going. I would never want it to end. Having listened to so many women whose lives
and the necessity of whose lives have made it very, very difficult for them to become the writers they
might have become or to have fulfilled all that they wanted to fulfill as writers makes it feel like a
huge privilege to have been able to do my work. So thats a responsibility.
On poetry: Its such a portable art, for one thing; it travels. And it is made of this common medium,
language. Through its very being, poetry expresses messages beyond the words it is contained in; it
speaks of our desire; it reminds us of what we lack, of our need, and of our hungers. It keeps us
dissatisfied. In that sense, it can be very, very subversive.
Sometimes I think its in all of us. It gets repressed. It gets squashed. Very often by fear. For me, I
know its been pushed down by fear at various times. Q: Fear of what? Fear of punishment. Fear of
reprisal. Fear of not being taken seriously. Fear of being marginalized. And thats why I think its so
difficult for people on their own and in isolated situations to be as brave as they can be because its by
others example that we learn how to do this. I really believe that justice and creativity have
something intrinsically in common. The effort to make justice and the creative impulse are deeply
aligned, and when you feel the necessity of a creative life, of coming to use your own creativity, I
think you also become aware of whats lacking, that not everyone has this potentiality available to
them, that it is being withheld from so many.
... Im tired of the lists--the litany. Were forced to keep naming these abstractions, but the realities
behind them are not abstract. The writers job is to keep the concreteness behind the abstractions
visible and alive. How can I be tired of the issues? The issues are our lives.

Other Interviews
Does poetry play a role in social change?
Yes, where poetry is liberative language, connecting the fragments within us, connecting us to others
like and unlike ourselves, replenishing our desire. It's potentially catalytic speech because it's more
than speech: it is associative, metaphoric, dialectical, visual, musical; in poetry words can say more
than they mean and mean more than they say. In a time of frontal assaults both on language and on
human solidarity, poetry can remind us of all we are in danger of losing--disturb us, embolden us out
of resignation.