Adrienne Rich
THE DEATH of leading poet and political activist, Adrienne Rich, robs the world of a fearless intellectual who found abiding truths in Marxism. These lines from her poem, Reversion, published in Dark Fields of the Republic, Norton, 1995, gave voice to women silenced in history and in the world . This woman/ the heart of the matter. Circling back to the city where her name crackles behind creviced stones.
This woman who left alone and returns alone.
A patrilineal Jew, Adrienne’s mother Helen Gravely Jones Rich was a musician and Christian who gave up professional life for motherhood. Her Jewish father Arnold Rice Rich encouraged his daughter to read and to write poetry. The male voices she encountered provided her initial education, and paradoxically helped generate her early success.
In 1951 while she was still a student at Radcliffe, W.H. Auden chose her book, A Change in the World, to be published in the Yale Younger Poets series. Formally purist, the subject matter promised liberation from conventional social norms and traditional poetic forms, which she began to fulfil in the early 1960s. In her essay, Not how to write poetry, but wherefore, she describes her quest for –“something larger, a sense of vocation, what it means to live as a poet – not how to write poetry, but wherefore.”
In Wallace Stevens’ Of Modern Poetry, she found the vital lines: “It has to face the men of the time and to meet the women of the time. It has to think about war. And it has to find what will suffice”.
Marriage in 1953 to Harvard economist Alfred Haskell Conrad, and motherhood to three boys failed to offer Adrienne “what will suffice”. It was her role as a civil rights anti-war activist in 60s New York, where Alfred eventually worked, which stirred her sense of commitment to social change and the political became intensely personal.
Her volume, Snapshots of a Daughterin-Law, Norton, 1963, depicting the suffocation of marriage, established her reputation as a key American poet.
But it would take another 13 years for her to come out as a lesbian, dangerously and assertively, in Twenty One Love Poems. This publication announced her as a poet whose unique voice insistently linked the personal with the political. Knowing first hand what it is to be marginalised as a patrilineal Jew, a woman and a lesbian, she went on to bring to attention such neglected poets as Muriel Rukeyser and Irena Klepfisz, who voiced the experiences of minority communities with whom she closely identified.
Adrienne Rich published some two dozen volumes of poetry and some half dozen volumes of prose. Her poetry has sold 800, 000 copies. Her many awards include the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize and the National Book Award which in 1974 she accepted, typically on behalf of all women, not herself alone.
But in 1997 she refused the National Medal of Arts, the highest American government arts award, on the grounds that the government neglect- ed social and economic justice.
Adrienne Rich was a cherished teacher at Columbia, Brandeis, Rutgers, Cornell, and Stanford Universities, and an outstanding lecturer.
Of all her works, she told me that the one she considered her most effective was: Dearest Arturo (What is Found There, Norton, 1993).
You’ve said, she writes, The great justification for the act of reading
and writing fiction is that through it we can be disciplined and seduced
into imagining other people’s lives with understanding and compassion, even if we do not “identify” with them. Yes. And in the act of writing, to feel
our own “questions” meeting the world’s “questions”,to recognise how we are in, to recognise how we are in the world and the world is in us.
When I began this letter, Arturo, you were still living, though life was becoming a terrible effort. Well, our conversation goes on, as we promised each other. Tenderly and angrily and with laughter.
There is no death, only dying, you said about one of my poems. And I need to ask, Does this make sense to you? Adrienne Adrienne Rich died of a chronic rheumatoid arthritis condition, and is survived by Michelle Clift, her partner of over 30 years , her three sons, David, Pablo and Jacob, her sister Cynthia Rich and two grandchildren.