from “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children”   2. To imagine a time of silence or few words a time of chemistry and music   the hollows above your buttocks traced by my hand or, hair is like flesh, you said   an age of long silence   relief   from this tongue            this slab of limestone or reinforced concrete …   I’d like to open my paean to Adrienne Rich with a quote from Rich’s sister-in-arms (words and limbs) Audre Lorde. “Your silence won’t protect you.” It’s a quote that haunts me in the days of not-writing, daze [Read more...]

When I think of Adrienne Rich, I do not always think of specific poems, even though her poems later hit me like lotus blossoms with a special ability to detonate.  My first stunning engagement with her work was through her way of thinking about writing and poetry through her essays.  I still have my paperback copy of What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics that she signed for me in 1998 at the Chicago Cultural Center. Her name written in careful, almost angular letters looked as if they became part of the design on the title page.  It [Read more...]

Adrienne Rich understood that being underestimated afforded one liberty to innovate. She predicted that most of us would have to revise our perception of power in order to see the world clearly.  She implored us to stop regarding our injuries with disappointment and bless them out of respect for our endurance. She practiced associative thinking with such dexterity that she made us take for granted how hard it is to employ metaphor without simplifying a subject.  How she maintained a sense of romance while writing a subjective, political poetry remains a mystery. Many of her poems and essays were provocations. [Read more...]

Adrienne Rich made the space for so many to come to poetry, to bring who we are – in all our queerness and rage and love – to poetry.  Like so many others, reading her poem “Diving into the Wreck” radically changed my relationship to poetry. It was in a college course on the literature of 1960s, and my former-hippy professor walked us line by line through the poem. As I read of the speaker’s descent into the ocean and transformation, I felt my body vibrate in resonance. “The sea is not a question of power.” The next day, I [Read more...]

As a new-to-the-school ninth grader I had the chutzpah to go to the chair of the English department and complain that my English class wasn’t serious enough. I’m embarrassed now, to think of how bratty and entitled I must have seemed, but I can’t regret complaining because in response, the chair gave me Adrienne Rich. He also gave me Jerome Rothenberg’s anthology Technicians of the Sacred (which I found interesting) and lots of Elizabeth Bishop (who I found totally boring). He gave me Sylvia Plath (compelling but also off-putting) and Sharon Olds (exciting but scary). Rich was my immediate favorite. [Read more...]

On Thursday, September 29, 2005 I traveled up to Miller Theatre at Columbia University, certain that this evening – Adrienne Rich would be reading old and new poems and then speaking about her work – would be inexplicably necessary for me to give myself permission to enter my own collision of identities further in a way I knew I was avoiding. I look over the entry in my journal for this evening, surprised at the feast of exclamation marks and a partial pencil sketch of Adrienne. The pencil is eager and there are fragments and notes I can no longer [Read more...]

Adrienne Rich loomed large in my life as a young poet and person.  She showed me how poets ought to live.  I went to a dinner at her apartment on the upper west side that she shared with Michelle Cliff and there was a Georgia O’Keefe on the wall—the first time I’d seen a major artist work in a poet’s private home.  There were books, books and more books and the stuff and nonsense of a life lived in words with great energy and also great suffering.  Soon she would move from Manhattan to Maine which was a huge mistake [Read more...]

My mother and I did not have poetry in common. She was a lifelong activist for social justice, a lesbian and feminist of Adrienne Rich’s generation, passionately committed to “the cutting-away of an old force that held her  / rooted to an old ground.” For her, poetry was fanciful, not the essential resource. And yet how well I remember the row of Rich volumes amid her library of non-fiction, her well-worn copy of The Dream of A Common Language with stars and emphatic underlines scoring “Transcendental Etude.” These were my first poetry books, read countless times on the hard floor [Read more...]

I was nineteen, recently enrolled at a reputable mid-western liberal arts college. I had aspirations of becoming a poet, but my professors insisted that first I needed to read “The Greats.” Instead of attending writing workshops I wrote academic papers about The Canterbury Tales and Paradise Lost, took tests asking me to identify the authors of sonnets by analyzing their subject matter and word choice, their metrical substitutions. All well and good, but there weren’t any sonnets written by females on these tests. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any female poets at all in the textbooks we were [Read more...]

I spent most of my early feminist life arguing against Adrienne Rich, especially the way her early characterization of form as asbestos gloves became paradigmatic for women poets during 70s and 80s. The threat I militated against was that watered down Rich often became crass identity politics in which the formal aspects of poetry were seen as barriers to the self.  The way I saw it: why not write bad prose instead, if formal structures prevent us from accessing a “true self”? At the same time, her essay on Compulsory Heterosexuality is so damn smart. I was — and am [Read more...]