On Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich, Collected Poems: 1950-2012. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016. $50.00, hardcover. ISBN-13: 978-0393285116

---. A Change of World. New York: W.W. Norton, 2016. $15.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-393-35257-3.

In “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (1971), Adrienne Rich argues that women poets need to create a new space for their work, and that they must deal with the writing of the past by understanding it in a different way, “not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.” For Rich, who had been thoroughly steeped in the masculine poetry of William Carlos Williams (for plain, unadorned language) Robert Lowell (for the fusion of the personal and the public utterance), Robert Frost (for colloquial yet controlled rhythms), and Wallace Stevens (for the negotiation between inner and external worlds), this meant a wrenching re-orientation of her aesthetic priorities. Although Rich would embrace the work of Muriel Rukeyser as a model feminist poet, and Emily Dickinson as an ideal of self-determination, her work would retain something of the tension between Stevens’ powerful binary structures (reality / imagination) and Lowell’s merging of sociopolitical and personal concerns. True to her commitment to understand in order to “re-vision,” Rich succeeds in reclaiming these poetic motifs for her own work, her struggle to envision a world shaped by women and their needs rather than strictly by the long-established patriarchal paradigm.

“Of the modern poets I read in my twenties, Stevens was the liberator,” Rich remarks in “Rotted Names,” an essay that details her wrestling with his compelling work and sometime regressive social attitudes. She conquers him by arguing that because of the “deforming power of racism” this “immense poetic gift is … compelled to frustrate itself.” Whether or not we accept her argument, it is a good example of how Rich critiques and reorders her poetic inheritance to make room for her own aesthetic and social needs. That motifs from Stevens’ poetry occur throughout her work indicates how complex and ongoing this reordering was. It is partly because of her concern with the shifting and frustrating qualities of reality that John Ashbery in a 1960s review calls her a “metaphysical poet.” Yet later, Rich’s poetry of the 1980s appears to Helen Vendler “so decisively social and psychological, and so forthright in its manner, it is tempting to review its arguments rather than its poetic character.” This suggests how sharply Rich evolves toward a poetry of polemic, although Vendler, after expressing some reservations, honors Rich’s project by concluding that she “will be remembered as one of the first American women to claim a public voice in lyric.”

Rich demonstrates that it is possible for writers marginalized by gender, sexual orientation, race, or ethnicity to claim a place in and revise the tradition to accept without compromising their perspectives. While she regretted that she had to work in a literary world mostly created by male writers, she knew it was impossible to stand completely outside of it. Her dream of a common language, which to a great extent she realizes, is one that accommodates every voice and overcomes the pernicious binary oppositions that render half of the equation superior to the other half. Her talent and determination, present from the start, made it possible for her to imagine reclaiming the language of poetry for half of the human race. With some hesitation at first, and then, from the early 1970s on, with ferocious determination, she pursued this socio-political and aesthetic task right to the end of her life.

This sense of vocation, however, is uneasy with the medium she has, of necessity, chosen. Poetry is as obdurate as language itself, a restless mingling of personal and public expression. Using means being used by it:

It doesn’t matter what you think.
Words are found responsible

all you can do is choose them

or choose

to remain silent.                      (“North American Time”)

Like Marianne Moore and more recently Ben Lerner, Rich is irresistibly drawn to poetry despite her need to express dislike or distrust of it:

Even if every word we wrote by then

were honest

·               *          *         

Even if we were told      not just by friends

            that this was honest work                                   (“Poetry: III”)

Most poets from time to time question the efficacy of poetry, but those like Rich who want to believe that poetry can effect social and political change or at least awareness, if they are honest with themselves, will suffer doubts not even the most powerful aesthetic means can allay. This desire to effect change in the world beyond poetry, change in the lives of women and oppressed people who may never have read a poem, underlies most of Rich’s work and allies her with poets like Pablo Neruda and Audre Lorde even when her aesthetic pulls in different directions. This tension only increases over the years, and sometimes empowers, sometimes mars her poetry. 

A Change of World, published when she was only twenty-one, established Rich as a poet of technical virtuosity, but her work would gradually abandon the established idioms of early 1950s poetry and move toward a more disjunctive, more challenging, and in some respects more Stevensian voice. Possibilities of change and transformation—social and political change, a corresponding transformation of the self—begin with her first book, but haunt all of her poetry. With grave consistency, but with many aesthetic and doctrinal digressions, she spent sixty-plus years catching tigers in red weather. “Storm Warnings,” the presciently-titled first poem in this first collection, reveals her congruence with motifs from Stevens and Frost. Her concerns with the ways inner and outer worlds intersect and interact, and the lithe syntax that enables this convergence, echo but don’t exactly imitate Stevens:

Weather abroad

And weather in the heart alike come on

Regardless of prediction.

And she then concludes this poem with a faint echo of the elemental fears that empower Frost’s Boy’s Will poems:

This is our sole defense against the season;

These are the things that we have learned to do

Who live in troubled regions.

Looking back at this poem after sixty years, it is easy to read it as a nascent feminist response to the harsh cultural climate of the patriarchal post-war era, when the machismo of the Cold War imposed new levels of masculine aggression on socio-political norms. Gradually Rich’s need to find a room of one’s own, a space in which women could develop their cultural vision without being crushed by tradition or the current political mood, would become more explicit. But from the start, Rich demonstrates a mastery of craft and a faith in the power of language that would sustain her work through periods of stress and depression, personal loss and physical suffering.

In a brief review of a massive and significant body of work we can only sample a few characteristic poems. “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” one of the most famous, develops in ten sections a portrait of a woman trapped in marriage, overseen by her domineering mother-in-law, and oppressed by her own frustrations. Even this early (the poem is dated 1958-1960), Rich adroitly exposes the oppressive conventions of womanhood.  As the poem develops so do the possibilities of a wider vision, “a freer self than history,” offering escape into a world of light and poise. The segmenting of the poem seems suggested by Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” while its complex allusions echo Eliot’s embrace of literary tradition in The Waste Land. “Snapshots” contains at least sixteen distinct allusions to Chopin, Dr. Johnson, Simon de Beauvoir, Herrick, Horace, and other cultural figures. Drawing upon the Western cultural tradition to challenge the place it assigns to women would become a common tactic in Rich’s work, but “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” is not only one of the earliest significant examples of her re-visioning but remains one of the most compelling. It is a self-liberating poem; it works from constriction to freedom through its own momentum. if it owes something to Stevens’ example, it also explores a psycho-social situation rarely invoked in his work.

Rich would continue to deepen her commitment to a poetry sensitive to gender and social issues. In “Orion,” the first poem in Leaflets (1969), she addresses the constellation as the embodiment of an objective and empowering passion from which she can gain the strength to confront the “all”:

You take it all for granted

and when I look you back

it’s with a starlike eye

shooting its cold and egotistical spear

where it can do least damage.

Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon

out here in the cold with you

you with your back to the wall.

“Out here in the cold” is where we find ourselves alone with ourselves, but Rich is not completely alone—she has her “fierce half-brother, staring / down,” and his shining example transcends human limitation to lend form and order to an otherwise muddled life (“children are dying my death / and eating crumbs of my life”). Orion as an emblematic male companion, one whom she can absorb into her own consciousness, foreshadows the “merman” of “Diving into the Wreck.”

Looking to the cosmos as a source of energy and power continues in “Planetarium” (from The Will to Change), which evokes the discoveries of Caroline Herschel and Tycho Brahe. But unlike “Orion,” this is an example of a strong poem that doesn’t trust itself, but peters out in unnecessary explication:

                        I am in instrument in the shape

            of a woman trying to translation pulsations

            into images      for the relief of the body

            and the reconstruction of the mind

The urge to explain her poetry parallels an underlying polemical desire, and although it rarely does serious damage, it does suggest that Rich, like other polemical poets, is not always quite sure that arguing in imagery, however well done, will suffice.

Titles like Leaflets and The Will to Change suggest Rich’s growing commitment to a poetry of social polemic, but she would not lose touch with the personal consequences of social constructions. Her powerful dramatic monologue of 1976, “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff” (in The Dream of a Common Language), implicitly rebukes the notion that for women childbearing is a creative act that renders art superfluous. This, of course, is a hoary old method of reserving the world of art for men. But Paula Becker, who would die in childbirth soon after writing this epistle to her sculptor friend, was an artist in her perceptions as well as in her medium (painting), as her language demonstrates:

            The autumn feels slowed down,

summer still holds on here, even the light

seems to last longer than it should

or maybe I’m using it to the thin edge.

The moon rolls in the air.

This attention to natural rhythms and lingering grasp of summer’s luminosity does not derive from the ecstasy of the mother-to-be: “I didn’t want this child,” she continues. “I want a child maybe, someday, but not now.” For now, her art is central: “I know now the kind of work I have to do. / It takes such energy.” Paula and Clara share an obsession with their work, the same obsession for which male artists earn honors. Paula presciently dreams of dying in childbirth, and dreams also that Rilke, Clara’s husband, writes an elegy for her, which she rejects because he has no right to intrude into Paula and Clara’s creative idyll. For Paula, the strength of women derives from themselves and their mutual interaction, not from men who even as spouses live on the periphery of their lives. This sad and beautiful poem, with its convincing and timeless voice, is one of Rich’s masterpieces. Every woman (and every man as well) who aspires to a life of creativity and self-understanding should treasure it.

A few years earlier, Rich had laid the groundwork for delving into the culture and dredging up clues—the material voices—to lost or forgotten, uncreated or unappreciated cultural artifacts. In “Diving into the Wreck” (1972), Rich’s persona dives deep into the unknown and becomes “the mermaid whose dark hair / streams black,” who meets her male counterpart, “the merman in his armored body.” Together they explore the wreck, the entirety of civilization, and become one in the pressure of great depth: “I am she: I am he.” This hermaphroditic entity both embodies and discovers the lost world, “whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies / Obscurely inside barrels / half-wedged and left to rot.” The complexity of this poem’s guiding metaphors cannot be easily unraveled, but for Rich it represents a mode of discovery. It dredges up wrack and ruin by diving into and through the horrors of what Elizabeth Bishop called “our worst century yet.” For the next forty years Rich would scour the depths and sift the ruins for telling details, hints of joy, clues to the psychology of oppression and the rage to survive. “Diving into the Wreck” is a mid-career manifesto that explains why so many of her later poems read like reportage, as in “Fire” (1991): 

                        in the old city              incendiaries abound

            who hate this place stuck to their foot soles

            Michael Burnhard is being held and I

can tell you about him            pushed-out and living

across the river            low-ground given to flooding

            in a shotgun house

            his mother working for a hospital

            or restaurant                dumpsters        she said a restaurant

Sometimes bearing witness seems poetry enough, but Rich rarely loses sight of the aesthetic imperative of her language, even in her very late work, as in part three of “Powers of Recuperation” (2007):

Spooky those streets of minds

shuttered against shatter

articulate those walls

pronouncing rage and need

It will take a long time for the rest of us to fully absorb and understand this vast body of work. As Jean Valentine notes in her afterword to Rich’s 1996 selected poems, “Women are not new to poetry, but only into translating it into the language of the upper air.” That language, although above and beyond the oppressions of gender, race, religion, is not easy to learn. Academics will be mulling it for decades, but Rich has more to offer those perhaps least likely to read contemporary poetry: people who in their daily lives struggle against domestic and political brutality, women crushed by being women in an unequal world, impoverished children deprived of food and education, men and women ground down by racial, religious, and social bigotry. Even when her poems falter with the burden of their polemic, or flatten into prose, they maintain a dignity of purpose, a serious regard for the world that should inspire others for many years to come.

Finally, a word about this edition. This collected poems achieves 1164 pages, including a preface by Claudia Rankin and an index. The preface is useful for those unfamiliar with Rich’s career, and Rankin offers some insights even for those already familiar with Rich’s work. The editor’s note (by Pablo Conrad, her son) is a delight. But at almost four pounds this book is too heavy for me with my arthritis to comfortably hold, and at fifty dollars too expensive for the people who most need it. However, Norton has done the world a service by making all of Rich’s work available in one volume, and also by reprinting her first book in paperback. Many of her individual volumes are still available, and I hope they will remain so for as long as possible. Books of poetry should fit into our pockets, our backpacks, our bicycle carriers, and should be readable in the bathtub. The Collected Poems is wonderful for those who can afford it and have a table to place it on, and belongs in every library in the English-speaking ecosphere (and beyond). But even in a world losing respect for physical media, the easily transported paperback poetry collection, which requires neither batteries nor Wi-Fi, remains invaluable, and I’m sure Norton won’t forget that. 

Other works cited:

John Ashbery, “Tradition and Talent: Philip Booth, Stanley Moss, and Adrienne Rich,” in Selected Prose. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004: 73-78.

Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978. New York: Norton, 1979: 33-50.

Adrienne Rich, “Rotted Names,” in What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. New York: Norton, 1993: 197-205.

Jean Valentine, “An Afterword,” in Adrienne Rich, Selected Poems 1950-1995. Knockeven: Salmon Poetry, 1996: 166-168.

Helen Vendler, “Carter, Rich, Levine,” in The Music of What Happens: Poems, Poets, Critics.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988: 368-387.