In 1949, Muriel Rukeyser said, in The Life of Poetry, "The only danger is not going far enough." She was writing of the poet's task of articulating feelings and thoughts being created at a moment in history for which no one yet has words. She was also speaking of the poet's task of revealing the taboo, the unacceptable, that which is carried around by people, yet not admitted openly.

And she was speaking of the poet's work in pushing past boundaries that are as much social and political as personal-that the poet has to be willing to be the one to go "too far" in the face of disapproval from her readers, in order to name the future germinating in the present.

In my own life of poetry, I encountered Rukeyser in the 1970s in this line-"What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?/ The world would split open." In my earlier years as a poet, I endeavored to embody in my poems my woman's life, the dangers and the pleasures. In the 1990s I was denounced as "going too far" in the most public way-denounced for daring to bring my lesbian life into poetry-by Senator Jesse Helms and the American Family Association.

Now, in the last few years, some of the social boundaries around that aspect of my life have fallen-and this area no longer feels so much a place I need to push towards with my readers.

Instead, I've turned to the new poems of "The Only Danger." These began as I grappled with where I live now, in the urban North, in relation to my upbringing in the Deep South of the U.S. during segregation. There, as a white girl, I grew up in unthinking acceptance of the economic and social system around me. There, all public authority was concerned with normalizing oppression based on racism. My school teachers, preachers, parents, elected officials-all enforced a system designed to seem as natural as water-its currents, its banks, unquestionable.

Except, of course, water was divided by law into "black" and "white" at the drinking fountains-and a whole population of white people drank that water thoughtlessly, routinely, every day. The continuation of that unjust system was based on training us not to notice what was going on around us, training us to simply accept the big and little horrors as "normal."

To break though the human-made conceptual fence around our experience-to show us in embodied form what we are living in the middle of-that is the task of a poet who wants to go "far enough."

Now I find myself living in the urban North, inside another system named as inevitable, an economic system where it is "normal" to walk past people sleeping in cardboard boxes on the street, "normal" for a man with open sores in his legs to walk through the subway begging for money for medical help. It is a place where a job layoff of thousands of people is described as "improved productivity," and where my neighbors and I, in our working-class immigrant-filled community, are significant only as statistics in financial indexes or an audience for "terror" alerts.

How might a poem break through this version of what is normal? What kinds of poems would go "too far" in this world?  The poems of "The Only Danger" are my attempt to answer this question:

Rush hour, and the short order cook lobs breakfast
sandwiches, silverfoil softballs, up and down the line.
We stand until someone says, Yes? The next person behind
breathes hungrily. The cashier's hands never stop. He shouts:
Where's my double double?  We help. We eliminate all verbs.
The superfluous  want, need, give  they already know.  Nothing's left
but stay or go, and a few things like bread. No one can stay long,
not even the stolid man in blue-hooded sweats, head down, eating,
his work boots powdered with cement dust like snow that never melts.

The poems are part of a larger project that I have been engaged in for some time, the investigation of the relation between the poet's imagination and the realm of social justice and social change. The events of my own life as a poet have led me to the question the relation between poetry, imagination, and the common good. I have been condemned on the Senate floor as a writer who corrupts, who "puts the wrong ideas" into people's heads.

But, for me, "wrong ideas" are many of the ones that I was raised with, the language of racist slurs, the vocabulary of brutal metaphors to describe women, and so forth. My work as a writer has been to question the connection between the freight of distorted imaginings that I carried from my culture-and the issues raised by my growing consciousness of oppression.

Nowadays, too often a consideration of such issues is blasted as "political correctness." But that term can be used misleadingly, disingenuously, to imply that criticism always limits speech or imagination. Instead, it seems more appropriate to ask how remnants of unexamined stereotypes in our experience, language, images, can limit our work as poets and as writers. We work with an imagination that is, after all, a product of our culture.

Raymond Williams, in Marxism and Literature, speaks of the "long and difficult remaking of an inherited (determined) practical consciousness: a process often described as development but in practice a struggle at the roots of the mind.." I am interested in how this struggle engages with the irrational, unconscious, deeply-held material of the imagination. And I am interested in how one result of that engagement, a poem, might then become part of consciousness, part of a new dialogue with unconsciousness.

As the current relentless drive for profit leads to "endless war," ignites ancient enmities, and invents new ones, it seems that humanity is indeed in a struggle for consciousness about the system we are in the middle of-call it what you will, globalization, capitalism. My aim in these poems is to interrupt the habits and givens of a reader's day within that system, the gestures and actions accepted as fixed, and inevitable.

My work in the poems is to make visible the scaffolding upon which each day is built, the constant repetitive work done every day, and the people who do it, and how that work embodies a larger economic reality. In this way, I hope to make visible the taken-for-granted moments of connection-and disconnection-between people which, if altered, could alter the world.