A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you (for you have known, somehow, all along, maybe lost track) where and when and how you are living and might live - it is a wick of desire. It may do its work in the language and images of dreams, lists, love letters, prison letters, chants, filmic jump cuts, meditations, cries of pain, documentary fragments, blues, late-night long-distance calls. It is not programmatic: it searches for words amid the jamming of unfree, free-market idiom, for images that will burn true outside the emotional theme parks. A revolutionary poem is written out of one individual’s confrontations with her/his own longings (including all that s/he is expected to deny) in the believe that its readers or hearers (in that old, unending sense of the people) deserve an art as complex, as open to contradictions as themselves.
— Adrienne Rich, from the essay, “What If?,” What is Found There (Notebooks on Poetry and Politics)