Poetry of witness presents the reader with an interesting interpretive problem.
If we give up the dimension of the personal, we risk relinquishing one of the most powerful sites of resistance. The celebration of the personal, however, can indicate a myopia, an inability to see how larger structures of the economy and the state circumscribe, if not determine, the fragile realm of the individual. We need a third term, one that can describe the space between the state and the supposedly safe havens of the personal. The cities bombed are other people's cities. The houses destroyed are other people's houses.