Like Vaclav Havel in "The Power of the Powerless," Adrienne Rich understood that there was great institutional fear of the spontaneity of individuals and small groups in society. Both writers honored the self-shaping individual, choosing her own path day by day, as a counterforce to broad social patterns and even, in time, to tyranny. Activism grounded in the honesty of one's own life--that's one way to connect the two writers. Neither said democracy could be created or deepened just by living a private life, but both saw an essential integrity flaring up there.

Here to the end is Adrienne Rich:

What is political activism, anyway? I've been asking myself.

It's something both prepared for and spontaneous--like making poetry.

When we do and think and feel certain things privately and in secret, even when thousands of people are doing, thinking, whispering these things privately and in secret, there is still no general, collective understanding from which to move. Each takes her or his risks in isolation. We may think of ourselves as individual rebels, and individual rebels can easily be shot down. The relationship among so many feelings remains unclear. But these thoughts and feelings, suppressed and stored-up and whispered, have an incendiary component. You cannot tell where or how they will connect, spreading underground from rootlet to rootlet till every grass blade is afire from every other. This is that "spontaneity" which party "leaders," secret governments, and closed systems dread. Poetry, in its own way, is a carrier of the sparks, because it too comes out of silence, seeking connection with unseen others. [from 'What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Peace,' Adrienne Rich]