Adrienne Rich: Poet
A Poet . . . in Love with the Hope of Telling Utter Truth
Adrienne Rich crystallized in her writing and life the complexities of awakening consciousness in modern women.
ADRIENNE RICH . . .
ON POETRY: Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
ON WOMEN'S ISSUES: The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
ON POLITICS: If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
Moving in Winter
by Adrienne Rich
Their life, collapsed like unplayed cards,
is carried piecemeal through the snow;
Headboard and footboard now, the bed
where she has lain desiring him
where overhead his sleep will build
its canopy to smother her once more;
their table, by four elbows worn
evening after evening while the wax runs down;
mirrors grey with reflecting them,
bureaus coffining from the cold
things that can shuffle in a drawer,
carpets rolled up around those echoes
which, shaken out, take wing and breed
new altercations, the old silences.
Timeline
Major life events and books
1929: born May 16, Baltimore, Maryland
1951: graduated from Radcliffe
1951: book: A Change of world; selected for Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for this
1953: married Alfred H. Conrad, a Harvard University economist; they had 3 sons
1956: book, The Diamond Cutters
1963: book, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law
1966: book, Necessities of Life
1969: book, Leaflets
1969: estranged from her husband
1971: book, The Will to Change
1973: book, Diving into the Wreck, won The National Book Award (1974)
1976: Rich came out as a lesbian
1976: book: Of Woman Born (essays)
1977: book, Twenty-one Love Poems
1978: book, The Dream of a Common Language
1979: book, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (essays)
1981: book, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far
1985: book, The Fact of a Doorframe
1986: book, Your Native Land, Your Life
1986: book, Blood, Bread and Poetry
1986: professor of English and feminist studies at Stanford University until 1992
1989: book, Time's Power
1991: book, An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991
1993: book, Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970
1993: book, What Is Found There (essays)
1995: book, Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995
1999: book, Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998
2001: book, Fox: Poems 1998-2000
2004: book, The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 (Book Critics Circle Award)
Poetry Unsettles . . .
Still, as a poet, I choose to sieve up old, sunken words, heave them, dripping with silt, turn them over, and bring them into the air of the present. Where every public decision has to be justified in the scales of corporate profits, poetry unsettles these apparently self-evident propositions--not through ideology, but by its very presence and ways of being, its embodiment of states of longing and desire.
--Adrienne Rich, from Preface, What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry & Politics
Brief Bio
Rich's father was Arnold Rich, a professor of medicine. Helen, her mother, a pianist and composer. In Rich's words her childhood was "white and middle-class" and also "full of books." She was encouraged to read and write by her father. In the home library, Rich was exposed to the likes of Blake, Keats, and Tennyson from an early age.
She married Alfred H. Conrad, a Harvard economist. They lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her first son David was born in 1955. Two more sons were born in 1957 (Paul) and 1959 (Jacob). Rich channeled the frustrations and weariness of being a mother into her writing. She struggled with the busy-ness of motherhood and finding time to write.
By 1966, Rich's poems reflected a transformation from housewife to being an active feminist. The formal structure of her earlier poems was replaced by a bold, assertive language that tackled deeply personal issues and expressed dissent over social and political injustices. Rich's poems were becoming, if they not already were, an agent of change.
In the late 1960s Rich and family moved to New York City. She taught at Swarthmore College and in an open admissions program, City College of New York. Rich also proved to be a more than competent researcher and historical writer with the publishing of Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976).
Rich continued to evolve as a writer evidenced by her later lyrical and sensual poems which expressed erotic love and lovemaking between women.
To Learn More . . .
- The Boston Phoenix
An interview, "A Rich Life," with Adrienne Rich, and Michael Klein (transcript) - American Poems
Biography and poems - Wired for Books
Audio interview with Adrienne Rich and Don Swai, 1987, 33 min. - Barclay Agency
Bio/essay, books, video, links - Modern American Poetry
Life and Career by Deborah Pope - Literary Criticism
A selective list of online criticism for American poet Adrienne Rich, favoring signed articles by recognized scholars, articles published in reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the MLA Guidelines for Web Sites - Essay re: Adrienne Rich
Book review, by Dana Gioia, of Rich's "Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998"
What Kind of Times Are These (Adrienne Rich reads)
All her life she has been in love with the hope of telling utter truth, and her command of language from the first has been startlingly powerful.
~ W.S. Merwin ~
Awards
- Bollingen Prize
- Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award
- Academy of American Poets Fellowship
- Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
- Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
- National Book Award (1974)
- MacArthur Fellowship
- Chancellor (former)of the Academy of American Poets
- Wallace Stevens Award (for mastery in the art of poetry)
- National Medal of Arts (refused, political reasons)
- Robert Frost Silver Medal, Lifetime Achievement in Poetry
- Book Critics Circle Award (2004)
- Wm Whithead Award, Gay & Lesbian Pub. Triangle, Life-time Achiev in Letters
Aunt Jennifer's Tigers
by Adrienne Rich
Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.
They do not fear the men beneath the tree;
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
Aunt Jennifer's finger fluttering through her wool
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
There is no one whose poetry has spoken more eloquently for the oppressed and marginalized in America, no one who has more compassionately charted the course of individual suffering across the horrifying and impersonal growth of recent history . . . and continue to be essential writings in the ongoing feminist struggle in [the United States] and throughout the world.
~ David St. John ~
In Those Years (Adrienne Rich reads)
Themes in Adrienne Rich's Poetry
ALIENATION <> Loss <> PUBLIC vs. PRIVATE LIFE <> Personal & Political Beliefs
SELF DETERMINATION for WOMEN <> Accomplishments of Women
Hope & Disappointment of American Dream <> CONTEMPORARY MOTHERHOOD
REJECTION of PATRIARCHAL CULTURE <> Lesbian Sexuality & Relationships
Time & Growing Older <> POETRY & POETS
REJECTION of PATRIARCHAL CULTURE <> Lesbian Sexuality & Relationships
JEWISH HERITAGE & HOLOCAUST <> Persian Gulf War <> RACIAL INEQUALITY
Burning Oneself Out
by Adrienne Rich
We can look into the stove tonight
as into a mirror, yes,
the serrated log, the yellow-blue gaseous core
the crimson-flittered grey ash, yes.
I know inside my eyelids
and underneath my skin
Time takes hold of us like a draft
upward, drawing at the heats
in the belly, in the brain
You told me of setting your hand
into the print of a long-dead Indian
and for a moment, I knew that hand,
that print, that rock,
the sun producing powerful dreams
A word can do this
or, as tonight, the mirror of the fire
of my mind, burning as if it could go on
burning itself, burning down
feeding on everything
till there is nothing in life
that has not fed that fire
But to be a female human being
trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination.
~ Adrienne Rich ~
Amends - poem by Adrienne Rich
Power
by Adrienne Rich
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.
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power.
Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
~ Adrienne Rich ~
