What is Found There

<p>The "impulse to enter with other humans through language into the order and disorder of the world is poetic at its root as surely as it is political at its root" writes Adrienne Rich at the beginning of her powerful new prose work. What Is Found There is Rich's response to her impulse as a poet to know poetry fully to plumb and scale and inhabit it; it is also profoundly Rich's attempt to bring poetry into the lives of many kinds of people - out of the academy away from the literary magazines. In a voice that is generous bold and personal Rich uses the poet's materials - journals and letters dreams memories and close reading of the work of many poets - to reflect on poetry and politics to consider how they enter and impinge on an American life and what it means to be a citizen of a fragmented country part of a people turned inward for safety. Rich acknowledges the cost of this turning: "We have rarely if ever known what it is to tremble with fear to lament to rage to praise to solemnize to say We have done this to our sorrow; to say Enough to say We will to say We will not. To lay claim to poetry." But she acknowledges hope as well. Speaking to poets to readers of poetry to all of us who imagine and desire a humane civil life Rich lays claim to poetry as an instrument of change and offers up its possibilities: "I see the life of North American poetry at the end of the century as a pulsing racing convergence of tributaries - regional ethnic racial social sexual - that rising from lost or long-blocked springs intersect and infuse each other while reaching back to the strengths of their origins."</p>