When Adrienne Rich died last month, I found a letter to the editor she wrote in 1997 on Why [She] Refused the National Medal for the Arts. She wrote a lovely, thought-provoking letter, but my favorite part quotes other writers, which I present in honor of April.
"If there were no poetry on any day in the world," the poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote, "poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger." In an essay on the Caribbean poet Aime Cesaire, Clayton Eshleman names this hunger as "the desire, the need, for a more profound and ensouled world."
No comments:
Post a Comment
I love to get comments and welcome them on any of my posts. There is comment moderation on posts older than 14 days, but your comments will appear immediately on current posts.
Due to th eabsolutely insane number of spam comments I have been getting recently, I have unfortunately had to turn on word verification. Please email me if you have problems posting a comment.