Adrienne Rich as a young poet. |
Note—Adrienne Rich, the prophetic feminist voice, poet, and activist passed
away five years ago on March 28, 2012 at the age of 82. This blog entry is edited from the tribute I
posted the next day. It can also serve
as an early teaser for the annual National
Poetry Month feature which will begin on Saturday, April 1 and continue all
month with daily entries. Mark your
calendars and get you poetry boots pulled on!
Adrienne Rich was 82 when she died
in California, a long way from the life of privilege and learning
into which she was born in Baltimore on
May 16, 1929.
Her father was a noted professor
of medicine at prestigious Johns Hopkins
and her mother had been a concert
pianist. He was a secular Jew, she a lady-like Southern
Protestant. Adrienne and her sisters were raised, not very intensively,
as nominal Christians.
Both parents cherished learning. Before
she was of kindergarten age Adrienne
was reading from their vast library, mostly English poets. Not
trusting their bright children
to a drab public education, Adrienne and her sisters were educated at home in that library until the fourth grade. In her later years she was sent to a fine girl’s school, Roland Park Country School, which she
later credited with providing “fine role models of single women who were intellectually impassioned.”
The progression to Radcliff College for her undergraduate degree was a natural one and she continued to flourish in the all women environment. She also took classes, mostly in poetry, at very male Harvard. Her very first collection of poetry, A
Change of World, was written as an undergraduate, selected by none
other than W.H. Auden for publication as the Yale Younger Poets Award winner.
Auden wrote a thoughtful
introduction lauding her technical
competence, craftsmanship and
“…elegance and simple and precise phrasing.”
Thus impressively launched on a noteworthy
literary career she traveled to Europe
on a Guggenheim Fellowship in
1952. Part way into the year she abandoned formal study to linger in Italy.
On returning to the United States in 1953 Rich married Harvard economist Alfred H. Conrad and
settled into the life of an academic
wife in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. Her first child, David was born in 1955, the same years as her second collection, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems, earned
praise and garnered awards. Two more sons were born and she struggled to balance the demands of
marriage, motherhood, and writing.
She felt a failure at all of
it.
Despite continuing to publish successfully, Rich could have been the model of the kind of accomplished, highly educated woman stifled
by conventional domesticity that Betty
Friedan wrote about in Feminine
Mystique.
The themes began to emerge more forcefully in her
poetry. She abandoned the carefully
crafted lines of metered rhyme which characterized her earlier work and
began to work in blank verse. The poems became more frankly autobiographical. Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law in 1963 delved into that
struggle followed in 1966 with Necessities
of Life.
Adrienne Rich in the '60's--fierce and feminist. |
Now both a recognized literary
superstar and open feminist,
Rich’s career began to eclipse that
of her husband. He moved with her to New York City when she accepted a post at Swarthmore. She latter also
taught in the Graduate School of Columbia University, and a free style “open university” at the City Colleges of New York. During this period she became deeply and publicly involved not only
in the feminist movement, but in opposition to the Vietnam War, and moved in
increasingly leftist circles. She
hosted events for the Black Panthers and
was a noteworthy signatory of the Writers
and Editors War Tax Protest pledge,
vowing to refuse tax payments in protest to the war.
Her poems were now overtly political. The publication of Leaflets, an examination
of the turmoil of the 1960’s, secured Rich’s place as a leading radical voice.
But all of this placed a strain on her marriage. He husband felt she was literally losing her mind and moved out. He was quite wrong.
Rich hadn’t lost her mind, but had decided
to become the quintessential class
traitor. Three months after the separation Alfred Conrad shot and killed himself. It was a
naturally traumatic event to Rich
and her children.
A cartoon by Alison Bechdel demonstrates the enormous influence Rich had on many women writers and artists. |
Yet the accolades and awards continued to pile up. There was the Eunice
Tietjens Memorial Prize from Poetry
Magazine, the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, another
Guggenheim Fellowship, and various prestigious
academic appointments.
She reached perhaps the pinnacle of her literary career with
the publication in 1973 of Diving
into the Wreck. This was the most intensely personal work yet, anguished
and angry yet clear of thought and expression. She was picked to share the National Book Award in Poetry with Allan Ginsberg in 1974, but declined to accept it as an individual. Instead she made national headlines by going to the podium with Alice Walker and Audre Lorde
to accept the award on behalf of all
women writers.
Rich’s life and work changed dramatically in 1976 when she
began her life-long relationship
with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff. She would
later say that her lesbianism was
both the natural fulfillment of desires
and yearnings suppressed since girl’s
school and a political statement. Her writing began to express this new life,
both philosophically in works like Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, her first
significant prose work, and lyrically in frankly erotic verse, the pamphlet Twenty-One Love
Poems.
Michelle Cliff became Rich's life partner, inspiration, and collaborator. |
She has continued to hold important teaching posts at Rutgers, Scripps College of San Jose
State University, and Cornell. She dedicated more time to essays, literary criticism, and political
theory, publishing several well received books.
Rich and Cliff settled in
California and co-edited an important Lesbian
journal, Sinister Wisdom
in 1981. She published three more books
of poetry in the 1980s and garnered more literary awards-- the Ruth Paul Lilly Poetry Prize in 1986,
the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in Arts and
Letters from NYU, and the National Poetry Association Award for
Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry both in 1989.
A revived interest in her Jewish
identity and what it means to be a leftist
Jew led her to found. Bridges: A
Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends in 1990.
An Atlas of the Difficult World, published in 1991, won the Los Angeles Times Book Award in
Poetry, and the Lenore Marshall/Nation
Award, Commonwealth Award in
Literature as well as the Poet’s
Prize in 1993. In 1994 she became a MacArthur Foundation “genius award” winner. All the while she served in mentoring positions to women writers
around the world.
In 1997 Rich made headlines by publicly snubbing the National Medal of Arts in protest to a House of Representatives vote to end
the National Endowment for the Arts
and policies of the Clinton Administration. She told
reporters “I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White
House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible
with the cynical politics of this administration...[Art] means nothing if it
simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.”
In the new century Rich was slowed
by advancing rheumatoid arthritis
but continued to speak out publicly, especially against the looming war in Iraq.
Adrienne Rich--the elder still untamed. |
She was named a Chancellor of the Board of the Academy
of American Poets in 2004 That
decade she produced four more collections of poetry, the last being Tonight No Poetry Will
Serve: Poems 2007-2010 and
three more collections of essays.
In 2006 she was awarded the National Book Foundation Medal for
Distinguished Contribution to American Letters followed in 2010 with the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin
Poetry Prize.
That’s more than enough official honors for anyone. But Adrienne Rich’s legacy cannot be measured in plaques, certificates, and engraved
bowls. It is in the hearts of all of the readers whose lives
she touched and enriched, all the students
she nurtured, all of the writers she
encouraged.
What Kind of
Times Are These
There’s a place between two stands of
trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks
off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the
persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at
the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not
somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own
truth and dread,
its own ways of making people
disappear.
I won't tell you where the place is,
the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold
paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it,
sell it, make it disappear.
And I won’t tell you where it is, so
why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times
like these
to have you listen at all, it’s
necessary
to talk about trees.
—Adrienne
Rich
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