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Adrienne Rich (1929 - )
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 Midnight
Salvage : Poems 1995-1998 by
Adrienne Rich
Rich's unwavering
passion for a more just world is in constant dialogue with her
sense of life's impossible complexity. -- The
New York Times Book Review, Matthew Flamm
W.H. Auden chose Adrienne Rich for the Yale
Younger Poet series when she was a mere 21. In Midnight Salvage,
a half century later, in an act part homage, part defiance, Rich
challenges the reader to reconsider whether poetry matters:
if a woman as vivid as any artist
can fling any day herself from the 14th floor
would it relieve you to decide Poetry
doesn't make this happen?
As we've come to expect from a writer who insists
that "all kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or
not" and "real acts are not simple," Rich sparks
necessary epiphanies. Her Whitmanesque embrace of the
silenced--the homeless woman, the drag queen, the
paraplegic--forces us to question and redefine who and what poetry
is for. This desire to widen art's access, to reject the
"death mask / and the english cemetery all so under control
and so / eternal," this refusal to play by the rules, infuses
every poem. In "The Art of Translation," for instance,
Rich celebrates the translator who allows access to the
canon-excluded, to the poet whose work is itself an act of
translation, and to any reader who speaks from the heart, "a
zone that remains otherwise untranslatable."
Daring in their passion to inform and incite,
these poems remind us that complacency is never an option. "I
wanted to go somewhere / the brain had not yet gone," she
confesses in "Letters to a Young Poet." Midnight
Salvage is evidence of a destination reached. --Martha
Silano
 Arts
of the Possible: Essays and Conversations by
Adrienne Rich
These essays trace a distinguished writer's
engagement with her time, her arguments with herself and others.
"I am a poet who knows the social power of poetry, a United
States citizen who knows herself irrevocably tangled in her
society's hopes, arrogance, and despair," Adrienne Rich
writes. The essays in Arts of the Possible search for
possibilities beyond a compromised, degraded system, seeking to
imagine something else. They call on the fluidity of the
imagination, from poetic vision to social justice, from the
badlands of political demoralization to an art that might wound,
that may open scars when engaged in its work, but will finally
suture and not tear apart. This volume collects Rich's essays from
the last decade of the twentieth century, including four earlier
essays, as well as several conversations that go further than the
usual interview. Also included is her essay explaining her reasons
for declining the National Medal for the Arts.
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From Modern American Poetry,
Compiled and Prepared by Cary Nelson
This site hosts the following:
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Interview by Michael Klein, The
Boston Phoenix
Excerpt:
Q: With The
Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977, your poems became
more political and more far-reaching. Coming out felt less about
disclosure and more about pure revolution. There was an incredible
sense of how that choice affected other people apart from
yourself. How can lesbian poets today, who for the most part are
already out with their first book, become part of American
intellectual life the way that you have?
A: The dilemma for a 21-year-old lesbian
poet who is already out may well be that so much is already
acknowledged and written about and published. How do you enter
those conversations that are already taking place, and the even
wider conversations about justice, power, or what it means to be a
citizen? There has to be a kind of resistance to the already
offered clichés, and I think that that's something every good
poet has to make up for herself or himself -- how to do that.
I came out first as a political poet, even
before The Dream of a Common Language, under the taboo
against so-called political poetry in the US, which was comparable
to the taboo against homosexuality. In other words, it wasn't
done. And this is, of course, the only country in the world where
that has been true. Go to Latin America, to the Middle East, to
Asia, to Africa, to Europe, and you find the political poet and a
poetry that addresses public affairs and public discourse,
conflict, oppression, and resistance. That poetry is seen as
normal. And it is honored.
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By Adrienne Rich (Los Angeles Times Book
Section - August 3, 1997)
Excerpt:
Note: Adrienne Rich's recent
refusal of the National Medal for the Arts puzzled many people.
The debate over the proper relations between the state and the
artist, between the realms of the public and the private,
continues unabated. Book Review invited Rich to explain why she
refused the presidential honor.
The invitation from the White House
came by telephone on July 3, just before the national holiday, a
time of public contention about the relationship of government to
the arts. After several years' erosion of arts funding and hostile
propaganda from the religious right and the Republican Congress,
the House vote to end the National Endowment for the Arts was
looming. That vote would break as news on July 10; my refusal of
the National Medal for the Arts would run as a sidebar story in
the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.
In fact, I was unaware of the
timing. My "no" came directly out of my work as a poet
and essayist and citizen drawn to the interfold of personal and
public experience. I had recently been thinking and writing about
the growing fragmentation of the social compact, of whatever it
was this country had ever meant when it called itself a democracy:
the shredding of the vision of government of the people, by the
people, for the people. "We the people--still an excellent
phrase," said the prize-winning playwright Lorraine Hansberry
in 1962, well aware who had been excluded, yet believing the
phrase might someday come to embrace us all. And I had for years
been feeling both personal and public grief, fear, hunger and the
need to render this, my time, in the language of my art...
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Listen to an audio clip of Adrienne Rich
"In many ways, I think of being in
relationship to a poem as being in a relationship with a person
... you draw on your fullest integrity, you try to speak the
truth, and you want to be heard, you want to be understood, but
you don't sacrifice any complexity for that," Adrienne Rich
explains on "Poets in person."
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Names Index:
A B
C D
E F
G H
I J
K L
M N
O P
Q R
S T
U V
W X
Y Z
| Authors
Index | Scholars
Index |
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