Picked this up in City Lights over the weekend and read it on the plane home today. I was a bit disappointed by both her and the afterword by Mark. Not their best work on the subject of politics and poetry. Still this passage did stuck with me:
“I hope never to idealize poetry–it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong.”