News at Eleven: This poem clearly separates the political

from the personal because they don't quite overlap for the poet. And that is generally true of Tonight No Poetry Will Serve. The political poems are brittle and self-righteous precisely because they don't draw on [Adrienne] Rich's best muse: her experience. The personal poems in Tonight No Poetry Will Serve are more supple, especially those on poetry's most traditional, existential subjects--love, loss, and death:

Called in to the dead: why didn't you write?

from Tablet: Words Fail

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