Poetry’s scope is big enough to encompass all of human experience. And yet, too often, political poetry is cordoned off from the lyric.poetry as though it were a poor relation.
I remember reading Adrienne Rich’s “Power” in grad school. The poem — about the different kinds of power and the toll they take on body and soul in a patriarchal society — manages to be angry and political, even as it maintains the highest of artistic standards.
Adrienne Rich, who died Tuesday, understood that it is all of a piece. Whether she was writing poetry or essays, she ignored the arbitrary distinctions we too often make in art between the political and the personal.
As the Times points out:
For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse — often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing — sounding like that of few other poets.
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Hank Kalet 