When Emerson, in 1840s, imagined an ideal American poet, he confessed his difficulties even with models of Milton and Homer; one he found too and other too literal and (Whicher 239). As with other of his pronouncements, Emerson leaves this one suggestively unexplained. I take him to mean that his ideal poet will be equally faithful both to what we call art and to what we call history, and that even in great poets, these fidelities are not easily reconciled. Czeslaw Milosz also drew attention to poet's divided loyalties in his Charles Eliot Norton lectures, delivered at Harvard in 1981-82. Milosz defined poetry as a passionate pursuit of Real(56), and then acknowledged, indeed insisted, that poet's motives are necessarily mixed.(1) In act of writing, Milosz said, every poet is making a choice between dictates of poetic language and his fidelity to real (71). But, he quickly adds, two operations cannot be neatly separated, they are interlocked (71). Adapting Emerson's terms, I want to explore way both literary and literal make themselves felt in work of three contemporary poets: Lorna Dee Cervantes, Cathy Song and Rita Dove. Each of these women is a member of a different American minority, and work of each exhibits pressures of particular, historical reality, and of poet's need to witness what is. All three of these writers experience what Milosz calls way events burdening a whole community are perceived by poet as touching him in a most personal manner (94-95). Yet work of these poets is shaped not only by their cultures but also by a passion for language's possibilities, for creative and experimental energy of poetry itself. At times this passion can seem to separate them from very communities of which they are a part; sensuous appeal of poetry may seem irrelevant to those who live amidst more pressing and immediate concerns. The poet's formal, literary education and her fluency with written language may also separate her from her cultural community. And while beyond scope of this essay, important issue of a poet's fluency in English, when her experience is multicultural and bilingual, further complicates this matter.(2) What, then, would faithfulness both to power of literary (with its creative use of language, its love of design, its connectedness to other writing) and to power of literal (with its material reality, its resistance to design, its relation to history) mean for poets like Cervantes, Song and Dove? This question must be grappled with in immediacy of particular poems, where imaginative transformations of language meet resistance to transformation that Emerson calls literal, or history, and that Milosz calls the real. 2 It was never in planning, in life we thought we'd live together, two fast women living cheek to cheek, still tasting dog's breath of boys in our testy new awakening. We were never way they had it planned. Their wordless tongues we stole and tasted power that comes of that. We were never what they wanted but we were bold. (16) These lines are opening of For Virginia from Lorna Dee Cervantes's powerful and accomplished first book, Emplumada (1981). In making this poem my starting poInt, I choose a work explicit about poet's double loyalty. For Virginia Chavez negotiates connection and difference between poet-speaker, whose access to literature and whose power with words separates her, to some degree, from Chicana world she grew up in, and girlhood friend to whom poem is addressed. As she explores her relation to Virginia Chavez, Cervantes also thinks through relations between poetic language and direct experience, between activities of poetry and of ordinary life. She begins For Virginia Chavez with pronoun we, asserting girls' mutual rebellion against their cultures' expectations for them. …