Rich’s lecture for a 2006 conference on Poetry and Politics at Stirling University in Scotland is the basis for this essay, published by Norton in a single small volume. With passion, critical questioning, and humor, Rich ranges among themes including poetry’s disparagement as “either immoral or unprofitable,” the politics of translation, how poetry enters into extreme situations, different poetries as conversations across place and time. In its openness to many voices, Poetry and Commitment offers a perspective on poetry in an ever more divided and violent world.
Adrienne Rich 