Understanding Adrienne Rich , livre ebook

UNDERSTANDING ADRIENNE RICH
UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE
Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
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UNDERSTANDING
ADRIENNE RICH
Jeannette E. Riley
2016 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
uscpress.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-699-5 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-61117-700-8 (ebook)
Front cover photograph: Adrienne Rich, Santa Cruz, Ca ., by Robert Giard, Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints, and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Estate of Robert Giard.
This book would not have been written without the support of the women who have mentored me throughout my life: my mother, Liz Riley, who taught me to love words and reading; Minrose Gwin, for introducing me to Adrienne Rich and guiding my development as a reader of poetry; Ruth Salvaggio, for engaging me in the study of language and its power; Magali Carrera, for pushing me to write this book and for exemplifying how writing is essential to what we do; and Kathleen Torrens, for her keen editing eye and insightful comments along the (long) way.
Thank you to the Estate of Adrienne Rich and Claire Reinersten at W. W. Norton Company, Inc., for assistance with permissions.
We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
Adrienne Rich, What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics
CONTENTS
Series Editor s Preface
Preface
Abbreviations
Chapter 1 Understanding Adrienne Rich
Chapter 2 A Life I didn t choose / chose me : Transitions
Chapter 3 Feminist Poetics
Chapter 4 Entering History
Chapter 5 Poetry and Politics
Bibliography
Index
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931-2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the over one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature.
As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many willing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed. Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers-explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives-and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion.
In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word.
Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor
PREFACE
For more than sixty years Adrienne Rich mapped who we are and what we believe in five essay collections, nineteen poetry collections, and four editions of collected poems. Her volumes of writings address a diverse range of issues including gender, class, sexuality, nationalism, poverty, violence, racism, and our individual and collective responsibilities to our local, national, and international communities. In doing so, she emerged as not just one of the foremost women writers in the United States but also as one of our foremost American poets. She is often cited as one of the most important poets of the post-World War II era, one of [the] foremost feminist theorists of our time, a groundbreaking poet who has shaped our understandings of political and social movements, particularly the women s movement, since the 1960s and a powerful essayist who has consistently examined the intersections of poetry and politics (Meese, Adrienne Rich 232). Over her lifetime Rich received numerous awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the National Book Award, the Frost Silver Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry, the Fellowship of the Academy of American Poets, the National Medal of the Arts, the Lenore Marshal/ Nation Prize for Poetry, the Lambda Book Award, and the Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay Task Force (Yorke 2). And this list is by no means complete.
There are more than three hundred articles published on Rich s work documenting the course of her career and investigating the development of her poetics. This fact alone speaks to her impact in American letters. A review of representative comments speaks powerfully to Rich s influence as well. Nadine Gordimer has claimed Rich as the Blake of American letters (Yorke 3). Judith McDaniel s 1978 essay outlines how no poet s voice has spoken as hers has in this period of profound social change in the relations between women and men, amongst women themselves. In the nearly three decades in which Adrienne Rich has been writing poetry, the quality of her vision and of her poems has been unique (321). In a brief review, Exemplary Poet, the critic Rafael Campo comments on how Rich s poetry is stunning in its originality and that it is an awe-inspiring work in progress, unafraid of the kind of conflict that engenders truth (43). Helen Vendler, who has often written about Rich s work, finds that the value of Rich s poems, ethically speaking, is that they have continued to press against insoluble questions of suffering, evil, love, justice, and patriotism (223).
Alice Templeton, in Contradictions: Tracking Adrienne Rich s Poetry, offers this assessment: Adrienne Rich s poetry has always raised important, difficult questions about the cultural uses of poetry and the ideology of poetic and critical tradition. For over forty years her work has provided the occasion for critics to comment on the art of poetry, its political significance, the character of poetic tradition, and the value of poetry as a critical and creative cultural activity (333). In a review of Rich s 1995 collection, Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 , the critic David St. John asserts, It would be hard to overstate [Adrienne] Rich s influence as a cultural presence. 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 human suffering across the horrifying and impersonal graph of recent history. Rich s extraordinary essays, as everyone must know by now, continue to be essential writings in the ongoing feminist struggle in this country and throughout the world. In her later career, Rich moved beyond feminist concerns to assume a Whitmanesque role assaying American culture and politics at the turn of the twenty-first century. As Mark Doty suggests, In Adrienne Rich s strong hands, the poem is an instrument for change, if we can see into the structures of power and take on the work of making a dream- the dream of a common language -an actuality. As Whitman did, she calls us toward the country we could be, though she insists we acknowledge the country we are (44).
Adrienne Rich died on March 27, 2012. The response, nationally and internationally, to this loss was immediate and speaks further to her place and import in American literature and culture. As Katha Pollit wrote, The death of Adrienne Rich marks not only the end of a long and transcendent literary career-thirty books of poetry and prose, prizes bey