Adrienne Rich RIP...

[AsianDivaGirlsWebDude]

Adrienne Rich, a poet of towering reputation and towering rage, whose work ? distinguished by an unswerving progressive vision and a dazzling, empathic ferocity ? brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century, died on Tuesday at her home in Santa Cruz, Calif. She was 82.

The cause was complications of rheumatoid arthritis, with which she had lived for most of her adult life, her family said.

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s.

Triply marginalized ? as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew ? Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.

She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of ?The Feminine Mystique,? did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women?s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women?s disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.

For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse ? often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing ? sounding like that of few other poets.

All this helped ensure Ms. Rich?s continued relevance long after she burst genteelly onto the scene as a Radcliffe senior in the early 1950s.

Her constellation of honors includes a MacArthur Foundation ?genius? grant in 1994 and a National Book Award for poetry in 1974 for ?Diving Into the Wreck.? That volume, published in 1973, is considered her masterwork.

In the title poem, Ms. Rich uses the metaphor of a dive into dark, unfathomable waters to plumb the depths of women?s experience:

I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently about the wreck
we dive into the hold. ...
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to the scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

Ms. Rich was far too seasoned a campaigner to think that verse alone could change entrenched social institutions. ?Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy,? she said in an acceptance speech to the National Book Foundation in 2006, on receiving its medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. ?Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard.?

But at the same time, as she made resoundingly clear in interviews, in public lectures and in her work, Ms. Rich saw poetry as a keen-edged beacon by which women?s lives ? and women?s consciousness ? could be illuminated.

She was never supposed to have turned out as she did.

Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore on May 16, 1929. Her father, Arnold Rice Rich, a doctor and assimilated Jew, was an authority on tuberculosis who taught at Johns Hopkins University. Her mother, Helen Gravely Jones Rich, a Christian, was a pianist and composer who, cleaving to social norms of the day, forsook her career to marry and have children. Adrienne was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church.

Theirs was a bookish household, and Adrienne, as she said afterward, was groomed by her father to be a literary prodigy. He encouraged her to write poetry when she was still a child, and she steeped herself in the poets in his library ? all men, she later ruefully observed. But those men gave her the formalist grounding that let her make her mark when she was still very young.

Adrienne Rich RIP...

ADG

[$5 submissions]

RIP. Her works figured pretty heavily in my upper division coursework back at Cal.

[AsianDivaGirlsWebDude]

Originally Posted by $5 submissions

RIP. Her works figured pretty heavily in my upper division coursework back at Cal.

I was first exposed to Adrienne Rich's writing while taking some Women's Studies courses in college. When I was the Forums and Lectures chairperson for the Student Union, I had her do a reading during Women's History Month.

A few Adrienne Rich poems:

For Example
November 23, 1963

Sometimes you meet an old man
whose fist isn't clenched blue-white.
Someone like that old poet

whose grained palm once travelled
the bodies of sick children.
Back in the typed line

was room for everything: the blue
grape hyacinth patch,
the voluntary touch

of cheek on breast, the ear
alert for a changed heartbeat
and for other sounds too

that live in a typed line:
the breath of animals, stopping
and starting up of busses,

trashfires in empty lots.
Attention once given
returned again as power.

An old man's last few evenings
might be inhabited
not by a public?

fountains of applause off
auditorium benches,
tributes read at hotel banquets?

but by reverberations
the ear had long desired,
accepted and absorbed.

The late poem might be written
in a night suddenly awake
with quiet new sounds

as when a searchlight plays
against the dark bush-tangle
and birds speak in reply.

Translations
December 25, 1972

You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow
enough to let me know
she's a woman of my time

obsessed

with Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn

trying to make a call
from a phonebooth

The phone rings endlessly
in a man's bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
Never mind. She'll get tired.
hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy
and will in her own way
light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political

ADG