Adrienne Rich

Image from Encyclopedia.com (Public Domain)

I have spent the afternoon reading poetry by Adrienne Rich who passed away last week. I still remember the first time I read a poem of hers. In my sophomore year of college I took a course in Feminist Literature. It was taught by a very dynamic professor who vowed to open our eyes to the power of female authors and what she said was true. One of the novels we read was Surfacing by Margaret Atwood which was so raw, and so real that it took my breath away. It is a work I have never read again, even though I am a re-reader.

We also had an anthology that I wish that I had kept. It contained works of female authors ranging from early authors of England, America, and France to the new feminists of the 1970’s. One of those poets was Adrienne Rich, an author The Wall Street Journal called “an American Literary Trailblazer”.

Rich was born in Maryland in 1929 to educated and cultured parents. Her mother was a concert pianist and her father was The Chairman of Pathology at John Hopkins Medical School. Home schooled until the fourth grade, Rich eventually graduated from Radcliffe in 1951 and published her first poetry collection A Change of World.  She married, had three sons, and wrote increasingly personal poetry. She taught, became involved in political issues, wrote, and worked on finding herself and her voice. Voice, language, and encouraging participation in the dialogue was so important to Rich and this is so aptly expressed by D.A. Powell in his column in the Journal:

For me, a young queer man finding his way into the study and practice of writing, the unheard voices of women and other minorities breaking at last through the generations of silence that had hidden them were a clarion. To make oneself visible in one’s art was a political act, and no one better exemplified that courage than Rich. She provided support, and thereby permission, for a slew of writers whose voices might otherwise have fallen silent. She urged young writers to be themselves visible; to astonish the world with the reportage of their lives and histories. Though she gained prominence as a “female poet,” she was, for all, a poet. A poet without category. Herself.

Rich has left us but her words will live on – her comments on poetry and life timeless:

A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Lying is done with words and also with silence.

And my favorite Rich quote

The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.

This quote speaks the truth, my mother and I often speak of the connections between women, the friendships and sisterhood that binds us together making us stronger when we have to ride the rough tides of life. I am also reminded of a recent lunch I had with some girl friends – friends that span the political spectrum from self-proclaimed Socialist to religious Conservative. And yet, when speaking of women’s issues in the news we found ourselves speaking with one voice.

And there is also Rich’s poetry which will continue to ring forth – startling the college student on a road to discovery and giving a sense of familiarity to a middle-aged woman reading on a couch with an overweight orange cat sleeping in the sun. Rich paints powerful pictures with simple language such as the opening of Power:

Living in the earth-deposits of our history

Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.

Or these lines from Homage to Winter:

the cotton pants stirring on the line, the
Empty Coke can by the fence
onto the still unflowering
mysterious accacia
and a sudden chill takes the air

Poems that speak to the times we live in, outlining our political reality, a reality we can ignore to our peril or face such as What Kind of Times are These:

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

And the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled

this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light-

ghost-ridden crossroads leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all; it’s necessary

to talk about trees.

Or poems that quietly and completely take your breath away:

Livresque

There hangs a space between the man
and his words

like the space around a few snowflakes
just languidly beginning

space
where an oil rig has dissolved in fog

man in self-arrest
between word and act

writing agape, agape
with a silver fountain pen

Adrienne Rich lived to give herself, and others – a voice, a voice that speaks the truth about experience (both personal and shared), a voice that is at times angry, forceful, examining, searching and encouraging. Adrienne Rich may have left us but her voice is still here, She is still speaking. For that, I am grateful.

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