I believe we're all united here by the will to change, to change both poetry and society, in whatever complex order necessary to deal with the two things at the same time. And clearly we are indebted to Adrienne Rich for an extremely effective example of how to change both. Her work has made it obvious to many just how partial universal subjects are.
Poets have to pay real attention to the fact of other bodies.
It will touch on Wordsworth, bathroom graffiti, the erotic and the anti-erotic sides of history, decorum and pleasure. We were in the 800's, standing eagerly amid the old copies of the Romantics. Looking at the dark blue spines of Wordsworth's Collected, I thought how the intensity of his need to express his unplaced social being in sentences had produced publicly verifiable beauty so that his subsequent civic aspirations seemed to have importance enough for him to become Poet Laureate and how his later leaden writing upheld that intensity and verifiability, only instead of searching wind and rocks and retina for the sentences of his social being, he chirped his confirmed lofty perch to other social beings in lengthy claustrophobic hallelujahs for the present moment. There are devices to keep it still, long enough, and he had learned them. Rhyme was a burden, crime was unambiguously, explanably wrong, time had snuck around behind him.