Like many people, I found Adrienne Rich in college.  I was 17 when I arrived at Dartmouth in 1992, where the student body was still 60 percent male despite the fact that the school had gone co-ed 20 years before.  After growing up in a liberal Jewish neighborhood outside New York City, I found myself on one of the most conservative college campuses in the country.  “This is the place. / And I am here.” In my first year, I had one of the last of the old-guard professors in the English department for a course on Fitzgerald and Hemmingway.  [Read more...]

Sometimes you cannot see it.  Underneath my blouse are red and purple feathers.  Ghosts in the grass say nothing.  Could not hear the truer me coming from behind.  People smile because they think I am a woman but really I am a monster.  In between fingers I take the heart of the bread.   There were noses, eyes, cities and palms to make.  Our hearts lettered.  We sent signals to the sky or down into the ground.  Occasionally there will be fire.  Every book says so.  It is easy to look into the flame and see something promising.  Listen and [Read more...]

I first read the work of Adrienne Rich in a New England Women Poets class at the University of New Hampshire. The course reading list included Rich’s Your Native Land, Your Life (1986).  In these poems, I found a voice unlike any I had heard before: honest, self-exploratory, political, sometimes crude, sometimes tender. The poems address issues of womanhood, sexuality, identity, tradition, violence, suffering, victimhood, and detritus. Although they contain cause for despair—Rich refuses to ignore the world as it is—their speaker never succumbs to that despair. Instead, she praises “the edges that blur” and reminds that “We’ll dream of [Read more...]

Flying was extra hellish that day. Departing from Boston with two interns in tow, I was heading to the AWP Conference in Tempe to represent AGNI, the magazine where I was then an editor. First delayed by fog for hours, we then spent another two sitting on the tarmac at Logan. We arrived very late and grumpy. We wanted a drink. No really. We WANTED a drink. To that end, we walked into the slammed hotel bar, not an open table for miles, determined to sit our asses down. I spied an old woman sitting alone at a four top [Read more...]

At the age of twenty, I became intoxicated with Adrienne Rich’s prose as if I’d been made aware of a fabulous secret that revealed the truths embedded deep beneath my lived life. Rarely did I speak of what she’d taught me, not then. But everything I experienced had a new filter, and I suddenly saw the world I lived in quite clearly. Yet, I acted otherwise. You would not have known, watching me in motion in the life I was gifted at that time, that I had a sort of sinister awareness about my position as a woman in the [Read more...]

Feminism was my dark art in college–I was apprentice to Adrienne Rich. In a literature class, the professor taught us “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” and “Diving into the Wreck” side by side to demonstrate how Rich’s work was transformed by her growing feminism. Although the first poem was dazzling, the nerviness of “Diving into the Wreck” entranced me. The poem’s images and syntax were fraught with mythos and possibility. Like the speaker in the poem, I was searching for a lineage; Rich would be my point of departure. I wrote imitations of her poems, read her essays, filled my copies of [Read more...]

for Adrienne Rich in 2006   The poet’s hands degenerate until her cup is too heavy.   You are not required to understand. This is not the year for understanding.   This is the year of burning women in schoolyards and raided homes, of tarped bodies on runways and in restaurants.   The architecture of the poet’s hands has turned upon itself.   This is not the year for palliatives.  It is not the year for knowing what to do.   This is the year the planet grew smaller and no country would consent to its defeat.   The poet’s [Read more...]

If the ladder is a woman, the very first ladder, the ladder that goes down into the sea where all the words we make float unnamed in warmth, that ladder is she. In a room where all the cherry blossoms float by the long windows, but we are not blossoming, we are diving, first divers, into the airless world of poems, a ladder that is a woman comes to us, and she helps us go downward. The ladder has rungs made up of a long time of being forgotten. How can a ladder become a ladder if it is never [Read more...]

“Adrienne Rich was the poet who made me want to become one.” That’s what I raced to type into my Facebook status as soon as I learned of her passing a week ago. As I sat and watched my feed refresh—wanting to be among poets, if only virtually—I was struck by how quickly my feed began to overflow with Rich’s words. I was surprised not by the number of posts, but by their tone. For the first time I learned how many lives she’d changed—how many people, men and women, young and old, had clung to her words or been [Read more...]

Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde — It is impossible for me to commemorate one without the other.  The friendship and poetic bonds of these two poets stood out loudly, brashly, on my own coming-of-age landscape, which happened to be a very large predominantly-white college campus on the outskirts of Baltimore, complete with a mix of people of various faiths, ethnicities, sexualities, etc..  In the classroom, I was introduced to Adrienne Rich the same semester I found the work of Audre Lorde via my then-professor, Elaine Hedges, known for having brought “The Yellow Wallpaper” back to the public eye.  Having just [Read more...]