“For a poem to coalesce…there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality that is in no way passive. And a certain freedom of the mind is needed – freedom…to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that …the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away. Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living…. nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite, or to call experimentally be another name. For writing is re-naming.”
Adrienne Rich, from “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision”