this book:
Poetry and Politics in Adrienne Rich (1951-1999)
by Rodrigo Espinosa Cabral
This thesis was defended and approved on 21st February 2001
in Florianópolis - SC - Brasil,
at Federal University of Florianópolis UFSC
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
Master in English and its respectives Literatures.
Copyright © 02/21/2001 by Rodrigo Espinosa Cabral. Reprinting of this thesis in its complete, unmodified form for strictly non-profit purposes is both authorized and encouraged provided that this copyright is included.
Chapter 3
Possibilities of a Feminist Poetry
Antiwar Activism, Androgyny, Social Lyricism and Lesbianism (1969-1986)
Leaflets (1969) is the first book Adrienne Rich wrote after having moved to New York City in 1966 and the last book she published as a heterosexual wife. In the seventies, after her husband’s death, she would increase the amplitude of her feminist poetry, widening it up to lesbianism-related themes. This collection stabilizes the increasing feminist awareness Rich had being experiencing since Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, expanding its themes to questions related to her Jewish identity, to the Vietnam War, and to the so-called Cold War. The very act of "leafleting" suggested by the title can be associated to Rich's significant participation as activist in anti-war and women liberation movements in New York.
"Nightbreak" is a poem that synthesizes this thematic expansion in her poetry. In his essay "Adrienne Rich, North America East," Terrence Des Pres affirms that "the poet's openness to the world makes her vulnerable to the world's horror, especially the violence her own nation visits upon helpless children elsewhere [...]" (364). "Nightbreak" presents a political way of demonstrating how the public sphere interferes in the personal as the speaker tries to sleep but is impeded by the horrors of the world:
In the bed the pieces fly together
and the rifts fill or else
my body is a list of wounds
symmetrically placed
a village
blown open by planes
that did not finish the job
The enemy has withdrawn
between raids become invisible
there are
no agencies
of relief
the darkness becomes utter
Sleep cracked and flaking
sifts over the shaken target (24-37)
If in the fifties, Adrienne Rich showed a tranquil speaker, able to sleep and even dream with ordinary issues as demonstrated in the poem "Bears," in the late sixties she is disturbed by "pieces" and "rifts" of the Vietnam War (1954-1975). These disturbing fragments are related to facts and news about the conflict, which in the poem act as splinters broken off from the bombings to provoke "wounds" in her "body." Rich's speaker acts as a receiver of the atrocities of the war. To a certain extent, the speaker's wounds are reflected in her insomnia and preoccupation.
Rich behaves as she were a real participant in the war, as if a distant fact like the bombarded village had caused actual wounds in her body, and not only on her psychological level—in her discernment or feelings about that military event as the news commonly cause. The wounds pervade the poem and can be associated with the empty spaces rifting its form and metaphorically enlarging the personae’s excoriations. In addition, these gaps widen the meter and break the rhythm of the poem. Read aloud, as pauses, they suggest moments of reflection for the reader. On its turn, the lack of punctuation can be seen as a strategy to increase the bleeding in the "wounds," and to disturb the reading, emphasizing the speaker's mental turmoil in relation to the war.
Towards its end, the poem indicates pessimism:
What breaks is the night
not day The white
scar splitting
over the east (38-41)
In the passage, the night, an allusion to obscurity, terror and unrest, breaks the day. Commonly day would represent clarity, peace and in the poem's context hope, but the speaker describes it as a "white scar" (39-40) whose image can emblematically represent the suffering caused by the west (USA) "over the east" (41) (Vietnam). Even this sad representation of the day is overcome by the "nightbreak," darkening any chance of optimism in the poem.
However, the closing image describes how the day would be, had it not been broken by the night. In this supposition, the metaphor "white scar" can mean that the nocturnal wounds were healed and scarred during the day, and the poem moves to suggest an end to the war:
The crack weeping
Time for the pieces
to move
dumbly back
toward each other. (42-46)
In this final movement, the persona imagines a soft, dumb or female-like (in the sense of silent) manner of ending the sufferings of war. Its wounds and splinters are simply moved back "toward each other" (46) as a rewound videotape, leading to the reestablishment of that lost harmony.
Other poems in Rich's fifth collection keep her thematic expansion, dealing with different political questions. In "The Demon Lover," written in 1966, the possibility of a nuclear attack is considered:
We were all sitting at table
in a kitchen in Chicago.
The radio had just screamed
that Illinois was the target.
No one felt like leaving,
we sat by the open window
and talked in the sunset.
I'll tell you that joke tomorrow,
you said with your saddest smile,
if I can remember. (57-66)
The fragment represents a lyrical form in which the poet exposes her citizen fragility in relation to the imminence of a devastating nuclear war. The decision of not leaving (even because there would be no escape from radiation) can be seen as an attitude towards the continuity of life, as if the people involved were demonstrating a fondness to their friendship on the verge of enjoying their life style until the very last moment. At the same time, the use of articulated language to express hope: "I'll tell you that joke tomorrow" (64) is disavowed by the body language's "saddest smile" (65). This subtle opposition constitutes a lyric sorrow that pervades the situation, and manifests a human-centered criticism against war.
Thereby, in Leaflets, Adrienne Rich combined different poetic forms. On the one hand, the collection alternates the presence of such lyric elements with slogans Rich brought from her activism in New York. In the poem "Implosions," a single-line stanza exemplifies this use of slogans: "All wars are useless to the dead." On the other hand, the collection incorporates classical elements. In the poem "Orion," for example, Rich used the mythical giant hunter who pursued the Pleiades to depict her change in relation to this male hero, passing from admiration to criticism. Other significant changes in her work would be seen in her next book.
The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970 published in 1971, as its title points out, marks Adrienne Rich's will to promote change through and in her poetry. In the five-section poem "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children," Rich for the first time inserts prose in her poetry:
1. My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven and twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics textbook in the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his house for a week, and has forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. "The burning of a book," he says, "arouses terrible sensations in me, memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the idea of burning a book." (1)
In initiating the poem with this prose introduction, Rich establishes a tone of intimacy with her readers, mainly her female ones. The clarity and objectivity of the prose associated to the familiar issue described serve to call the attention of mother readers, implicitly appealing to a type of communal understanding between women, as next door housewife neighbors sharing secrets and experiences concerning sexuality and motherhood. In this prose fragment, the speaker's neighbor, a man, is presented as an authoritarian force forbidding children. Some lexical choices start placing him as an enemy—he has emotions, but of a "violent" sort, and in his relation to art, as a collector, he is indirectly designed as a selfish person, for desiring to own works that should belong to the collectivity.
After the prose presentation of setting and characters, the poem gains a metrical structure. Rich uses this to cite an encyclopedia and some books, among them The Trial of Jeanne d'Arc, the French peasant heroine whom the persona affirms to dream of "too often." Those books were cited to summarize the speaker's feelings towards them: "love and fear in a house / knowledge of the oppressor / I know it hurts to burn" (19-21). As a poet Rich loves books, even so, she recognizes in them the "knowledge of the oppressor," that brings fear. With an ambiguous expression—"I know it hurts to burn"—Rich closes the first section of the poem. The hurt can refer either to her male neighbor's hurt, who as an oppressor would feel attacked by the burning of the mathematics textbook, which would symbolize a weakening in his power, or to Joan of Arc's burning, an episode that served to deprive a female force from its strength, since Arc was burned at the stake as a witch to discourage other women from following her heroine’s conduct.
In the second section, Rich reinforces the idea of "knowledge of the oppressor" (38) identifying it as being the "oppressor's language" (39). Despite her awareness, she recognizes needing "it [this oppressive language] to talk to you" (40). This "you" is anaphorically referring to her readers and cataphorically referring to a representation of the oppressed individuals as showed in the third section of the poem:
3. People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money to buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food for her children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears in your eyes. (41)
According to the Norton Critical Edition’s footnote, this prose excerpt "was written by one of Rich's students in the Open Admissions Program at City College of New York" (41). Since this quotation does not observe basic grammar rules such as the distinct third person singular forms in the present tense as "a child steal" or "she do not," it is evident that Rich is appropriating an underdog language. Her strategy is to dialogue with this oppressed discourse, italicizing it and giving it visibility, since non-standard languages are often excluded from poetry. When contrasted to a poem like "Orion" in her previous volume, which recurred to a classic reference of Greek Mythology, Rich's conduct in her sixth book signalizes the will to change proposed in its title.
The fourth section of the poem reaffirms the ideas of fear and love of books in the first section, opting for a radical conclusion:
What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature
still it happens
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]
there are books that describe all this
and they are useless (73-74)
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]
no one knows what may happen
though the books tell everything
burn the texts said Artaud (64-67, 73-74, 82-84)
The Norton Critical Edition provides a footnote to explain that Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) was a French surrealist poet who claimed for the burning of books, "values and structures that inform Western culture" (42). The attachment of this idea enlarges the content of a poem that seemingly started as an elaborate defense of a "supermother" towards her (naughty) son, then contrasted the existence of (an implicitly man-made) literary system that oppresses the ones who do not have access to it by social or gender exclusion and concludes by proposing its burning.
Due to the force of the 4th section, in the final part of the poem, Rich returns to prose:
5. I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton's. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning, I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor's language. (86)
The fact of composing late at night can help her to gather courage and tranquility to express radical ideas since she is guarded by the murky mystery of the night. From this dark perspective she looks at or thinks of the daylight happenings. In her final reflections, Rich points out that oral and non-standard language as Joan of Arc’s and Frederick Douglass’ (American black abolitionist) have demonstrated power, due to its identification with the oppressed.
Thereafter, Rich applies segments of her student's prose cited in the 3rd section: " People suffer highly in poverty" and "Some of the suffering are." In voicing the oppressed, she admits limitation on her task: "I cannot touch you now," written with that formal spelling without contraction. Rich also subverts the neighbor's (the oppressor's) language: "The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me." This device equilibrates the struggle for reason. In the sequence, the burning is extended to the Catonsville episode, in which nine pacifists active in protest against the Vietnam War were tried and imprisoned for burning "several hundred draft records [i.e. papers] at a Selective Service office in Catonsville" (40). With this fact, Adrienne Rich supports her point, accusing the oppressor's language (and its "papers") of murdering innocent and oppressed people. The utilization of a historical fact as Catonsville concedes Rich force to defend the "Burning of Papers Instead of Children," not only her own children, but also young soldiers.
Concerning this passage, Rich attains a sophisticated form of interweaving personal and public discourses, assembling social differences within the public sphere in the poetic discourse. In the poem "Planetarium," written amid the spatial race years that took men to the moon (but excluded women), Rich presents ideas that allow a better understanding of how this interweaving occurs.
In the poem, a woman speaker restores the importance of the astronomer Caroline Herschel. The speaker is in accordance to Johanna Smith's essay "What is Feminist Criticism?" where she sets purposes of gynocriticism:
To (re)study well-known women author's, another [objective] is to rediscover women's history and culture, particularly women's communities that have nurtured female creativity. Still another purpose is to discover neglected or forgotten women writers and thus to forge an alternative literary tradition, a cannon that better represents the female perspective by better representing the literary works that have been written by women." (263)
In "Planetarium," Rich revives the forgotten figure of an astronomer. In doing so through poetry, she instruments her poem with the purpose of rediscovering "women’s history." This strategy is politically interesting; through her lyric, she rises oppressed women from a forgetfulness caused by patriarchal exclusions of female figures. As their history is emphasized, factual injustices are denounced—since many of those women had their merits stolen, denied or were burnt and killed because of their ideas.
I have been standing all my life
in the direct path of a battery of signals
the most accurately transmitted most
untranslatable language in the universe
I am a galatic cloud so deep so invo-
luted that a light wave could take 15
years to travel through me And has
taken I am an instrument in the shape
of a woman trying to translate pulsations
into images for the relief of the body
and the reconstruction of the mind. (35-45)
Clearly, she places her artistic function as a poet as more important than her biological function as a woman. In addition, she states that her ordinary life as a woman, the one which suffers pulsations is justified if instrumented, if translated into images by her poetry. These images in her poems have a power of relieving the body and reconstructing the mind, which logically had been affected by these pulsations.
Whether these "pulsations" come from elsewhere or from the speaker's inner self, this idea can be connected to Adorno's idea of mutuality of discourse between poet and society. The poet receives the pulsations and tries to translate them into images, into language. Rich's speaker is in syntony with Adorno, since he acknowledges the innate right a poet has of writing on the society s/he is a member of.
When the speaker claims to be an instrument of translation, she is being sincere to this writing right and to her inner beliefs, personal history and readers. In addition, she responds to "pulsations" that derived from her personal life, and not from a given ideology. In the moment of creation these inner elements pass from a stage of internalized forces (pulsations) to a stage in which they are externalized as images.
Alice Templeton in her book: The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne Rich's Feminist Poetics, affirms that
Rich's poetics depends on a reader's experience of her poetry. It is an event of cultural engagement in which the poems, resonating with and against each other, urge the reader to test various hermeneutic and ideological stances, and it requires the dialogic interaction among poet, poem, reader, and cultural context. For these reasons, the reader is indispensable to Rich's feminist poetics. (3)
The reader is the one to receive, for example, the "Planetarium" images. Through his/her perception the images can be understood or retranslated into several different possibilities. Such freedom conceded to the reader can be interpreted as a demonstration of the persona’s disengagement from a given ideology. In addition, since Rich is concerned with issues from multiple fields (astronomy, war, cinema, etc.) and considering that she usually does not provide notes for historical and women-related facts approached, it can be said that from The Will to Change on, her poetry became more reader demanding.
Another evidence of Adrienne Rich's genuineness and spontaneity in the late sixties is the perception of her poetry as something able to fail. Rich does not inform about the existence of a theory or previous study guiding her "light wave" (40) movements towards a more committed poetry, as she is still trying "to translate pulsations" (43). Even the translated elements, or images, are not sufficiently material or malleable to be understood linearly. She is dealing with a great amount of feelings, forces, customs and myths, or simply "pulsations," that are captured by the poetic discourse and named.
This discussion draws the conclusion that, back in 1968 when "Planetarium" was written, Rich already demonstrated roots that would allow the increasing interrelation of lyric and politics in her poems. These roots were fixed under important elements like her domain of the conservative craft and tradition, which gave her the credit to try other forms, and the aggregation of personal issues in her poetry, that opened her thematic to social problems. Since many of her social questions were faced by other women, Rich started to assume the role of a spokesperson of the women's liberation movement. In The Will to Change, this role is better identified in the poem "I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus" as an almost heroic voice, Rich promises devotion to the causes she defends, in a conscious attitude that paradoxically takes place in a dream.
I am a woman in the prime of life, with certain powers
and those powers severely limited
by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
I am a woman in the prime of life
driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce
through a landscape of twilight and thorns.
A woman with a certain mission
which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.
A woman with the nerves of a panther
a woman with contacts among Hell's Angels
a woman feeling the fullness of her powers
at the precise moment when she must not use them
a woman sworn to lucidity
who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires
of these underground streets
her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind
on the wrong side of the mirror. (3-18)
Part of the dreamy atmosphere of the poem is borrowed from scenes and images of Jean Cocteau's film Orphée (1950). These images pervade the poem, transmitting to it a tone differentiated from reality.
Claire Keyes analyzed the poem in relation to the myth of Orpheus. In her reading, the speaker assumes the role of a dead poet. For Keyes, the persona’s task is obstructed by "authorities whose faces [she] rarely see[s]," at the same time she makes use of modern elements from the male sphere, such as the Rolls Royce or the friendship with the Hell's Angels.
On a first reading, the title "I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus," can refer to the very moment or act of Orpheus' death. However, a close reading reveals that the poet really dreams she is the personification of the "Death of Orpheus," she is the humanized figure of Death that takes Orpheus's life and not the dead Orpheus as Keyes had affirmed. Part of the difference between these interpretations lies in the sources used. Keyes based her reading on the literary myth, while Rich is influenced by the film.
In the movie, Cocteau's, who is a Frenchman, exhibits a Latin representation of Death, which shows Death played by a powerful woman dressed in black, moving in a black Rolls Royce escorted by motorcyclists equivalent to the Hell’s Angels. Rich seems to be fascinated by her. It is important to remember that in the Anglo-Saxon culture, Death is a male character with an important presence in poetry, as in Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death" (Johnson’s 712). Perhaps, as an Anglo-Saxon, Keyes had a natural difficulty to understand Death as female. Rich took advantage of this Latin female Death and subverted the patriarchal existing symbol of a male Death. Politically, her attitude can be interpreted as a way of diminishing men's power over women, since a male reference for Death (as well as for God) demonstrates a patriarchal orientation of language.
Rich's fascination is expressed by metaphors like "I'm a woman with nerves of a panther," an image that reproduces Death's powerful character in the movie. Those metaphorical definitions of what kind of woman she is are juxtaposed forming a chaotically-displayed universe in which the persona lives and in a way commands. There is firmness in her actions: she faces the authorities, she has this certain mission. In sum, she feels her female powers as if the poem itself were a celebration of the discovery of these powers.
However, the poem is not directly connected to the public sphere, it is just the persona’s dreamy and therefore unconscious desire. The title asserts the euphoria in the poet's voice, in acknowledging that the poem is a dream, i.e., the reported celebration is unreal or at most works as a wish of the way things might have been to women. Within this wish, the speaker swears herself to lucidity, i.e., promising to be conscious. Her consciousness is translated by images, and what she sees, amid a blurred scene of confusion and violence, is her dead poet. I analyze this dead poet as a reference to the male poets who have influenced Rich’s early poems, as discussed in the previous chapter.
Since "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," Adrienne Rich increased the concerns with women matters and the efforts to compose a women-centered poetry. In "I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus," these concerns evolved to a source of alliance and dialogue between speaker and readers. First, the persona creates an opposition between (public) authorities and her. After that, she uses a discourse of self-enforcement, which confers her heroic traces. At this point, when read aloud by other women, some lines in this poem can work as an evocation of forces, as a kind of prayer claiming for power, as if the speaker were liberating them. For purging her emotions and possibly relieving her readers', in The Will to Change, Rich incorporates a heroic or messianic element in her voice as a poet, proper to generate followers and to make her a spokeswoman. The (female) critic Keyes reveals a womanly admiration for Rich that confirms this vision of Rich as a heroine:
Significant [. . .] is that Rich assumes the role of the bard among her people. As a woman who dares to transcend patriarchal barriers in becoming this "bard," Rich enacts a transformation that is personal, poetic, and political. Rich can, therefore, become a model for us [my emphasis]; her courage, her personal honesty, and her achievement are estimable. (122)
In the early sixties, Rich criticized aspects and customs of patriarchal society in a sudden way that sounded discrepant to her earlier texts. In the 1971 collection, she assured herself of those propositions and found a language to explain the brusque change her poetry experienced in "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," asserting herself as "an instrument in the shape of a woman" and as a "woman sworn to lucidity.’ If compared to "Planetarium" and "I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus," the poem "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" demonstrates words and images that help to expose roles patriarchdom inputs on women, anticipating issues of her later poems. An evidence of this anticipation is the recurrence of some phrases like "In the prime of your life" as in the second stanza of SDL:
Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact. In the prime of your life [my emphasis]. (7-11)
Here the expression emphasizes the futility and waste of potentialities by referring to an early womanhood. It is a harsh alert over women's behavior, directly addressing a (woman) reader in the prime of her life. This alert can also refer to the poet in self-reflection, dialoguing with herself and then fusing personal and public spheres. In "I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus," Rich reused this expression. The speaker here is more conscious of her powers and their repercussion, indicating to the readers that they should value the force in the prime of their lives.
In this sense, the poems in The Will to Change mark Rich's arrival at a stage she had willed to accomplished in SDL. In her sixth book, she consecrated herself to a lucid poetry and swore commitment to a women-centered poetry in a sometimes celebratory, sometimes elucidative manner. Thus, The Will to Change shimmers with its images the core of the feminist poetry Rich would achieve in her 7th volume, Diving into the Wreck (1973).
In 1974, one year after being published, Diving into the Wreck received the National Book Award. Rich accepted it along with two other nominees: Audre Lorde and Alice Walker. They decided to share the prize as a way of refusing the terms of patriarchal competition. This fact illustrates the way Adrienne Rich "embraced feminist ideology and became a spokesperson for the movement," as Keyes comments.
It is crucial to consider that the resonance obtained by Rich was firmly linked to her poetry since, in the early seventies, Rich was still an incipient author of prose. Thus, her poems, which had presented different elements as irony a decade before in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, straight connections to political activism in Leaflets, or the recognition of a heroic, dreamlike and audacious tone in The Will to Change, increase in Diving into the Wreck the will Rich had manifested back in 1964: to write poems that are experiences.
Her development, however, cannot be linearly identified, since some poems still carry extremist positions. "Rape" for example generalizes all men as potential rapists, once she depicts a neighborhood policeman (someone trustable) as a rapist. In "For a Sister," the persona declares on the first line: "I trust none of them" (175) an attitude that can be extended to all men. In her review of Diving into the Wreck, the writer Margaret Atwood points out:
[Rich's] poems convince me most often when they are true to themselves as structures of words and images, when they resist the temptation to sloganize, when they don't preach at me. "The words are purposes. / The words are maps," Rich says, and I like them better when they are maps (though Rich would probably say the two depend on each other and I would probably agree). I respond less fully to poems like "Rape" and references to the Vietnam War—though their truth is undeniable—than I do to poems such as "From a Survivor" (282)
In short, what Atwood appreciates in Rich's political poetry is its lyricism, which is a point quite similar to the social lyricism concept seen before. This kind of lyricism is more visible in poems that merge personal aspects of her life in social situations also experienced by her readers. "From a Survivor," written in 1972, is an example of this interaction. In this poem, the speaker is making a kind of audit of her relationship with her husband: "Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special" (9) and a reflection of the way in which she frees herself from his body: "it is no longer / the body of a god / or anything with power over my life" (14-16). Towards the conclusion, Rich criticizes his suicide "Next year it would have been 20 years [of marriage] / and you are wastefully dead" (17-18). His absence concedes her a clearer notion of time and, from the perspective of a survivor, she lives her life "not as a leap / but a succession of brief, amazing movements / each one making possible the next" (22-24).
Such propagation of personal issues in the public realm (since the poem is read) facilitates the reader’s interaction with the poem. In presenting an overview of Diving into the Wreck, Atwood affirms that "Diving into the Wreck is one of those rare books that forces you to decide not just what you think about it, but what you think about yourself. It is a book that takes risks, and it forces the reader to take them also" (280). As a reader, Atwood recognizes the efforts Rich demands on her readers, attitude that confirms Templeton's assertion on "the dialogic interaction among poet, poem, reader, and cultural context" (3).
Atwood was moved by Diving into the Wreck because it was a book of her own time. It mirrors, for instance, the effervescence of women's liberation movements, talking about issues that activists and intellectually-committed artists like Atwood were experiencing on a daily basis. In this context, Rich's 1973 volume functions as a herald and a catalyzer of energies and thoughts. Even without temporal distance, Atwood perceived the difference between poetry and the regular feminist discourse by that time.
If Adrienne Rich were not a good poet, it would be easy to classify her as just another vocal Women's Libber, substituting polemic for poetry, simplistic messages for complex meanings. But she is a good poet, and her book is not a manifesto, though it subsumes manifestoes; nor is it a proclamation, though it makes proclamations. Its is instead a book of explorations, or travels. The wreck she is diving into, in the very strong title poem, is the wreck of obsolete myths. (280)
Atwood found in Rich's poems not a repetition of ongoing discussions concerning feminism, nor another means to reinforce existent ideologies related to women liberation. Rather she identified a poetry that within its proper features found its own way of reacting to a given situation. Among these features (images, sounds, form, symbols, etc.) there is the use of myths, which Atwood perceives as obsolete and wrecked.
Undoubtedly, the myth has an important role in the narrative title poem "Diving into the Wreck," and consequently in the whole volume. It appears right on the first line, as something read, studied, and analyzed. The speaker's first movement is to read the book of myths, perhaps as a necessary background for the enterprise to come. In a way, it works as if the persona were assuring her readers of the seriousness of her journey, for in regular diving the diver undergoes a physical warm up (but not a literary one as the speaker did).
The arrangements that immediately follow are more commonly related to the activity of diving. She loaded the camera and checked the edge of the knife blade, then she put on her body armor and her mask. After such preparation, the poem starts to take the reader down, into an ocean of symbols, leading to the final one at the bottom: the wreck.
During this diving, the speaker feels like an insect, small inside the hugeness of the liquid surrounding environment:
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin (30-33)
In such situation, even physical and geographical truths are mistrusted. The ocean as a vast body of water that links continents and provide minerals and food to billions of beings can be associated to maternal nourishment. Thereby, the water that composes it can be identified as belonging to the female realm. In the poem, the persona is immersed in the ocean, without perceiving its limits; this could mean that the persona is unable to name its immensity and potentialities.
At this rate, the ocean represents the unknown, the uncontrolled medium that takes the diver to his/her objective: the wreck. One possible interpretation for this liquid medium is language, or poetry itself. The diver is diving into poetry in order to reach (understand) the sunken (failed) ship in which a patriarchal culture is based. As Rich's speaker goes down, the ocean becomes darker and the purpose of the journey is clearly revealed.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth (52-63)
The objective is to look at "the damage done" with poetic eyes. It is through poetry that Rich visualizes the reality, retelling it in a poetic narrative form that, as Atwood observes, forces the reader to decide what to think about it and about him/herself. This occurs because the elements in "Diving into the Wreck" suggest symbolic levels, demanding interpretation. Thus, "the thing itself," i.e., "the wreck" focuses not on myths or histories about the wreck, but on the results, on what is drowned, "the damage that was done" (55).
Since "the thing itself" is wrecked, presumably in some historic or utopian period men and women knew how to "fluctuate" or live on the earth, before the wreck. In this ideal period, humans would express their very nature, in a free context, out of social impositions or gender roles. In opposition, "the wreck" and its myths (that the diver had read before the enterprise) encompass the ways our culture has imposed differences upon men and women, differences that wrecked an equally mythicized harmony that presumably Adam and Eve could have experienced on the Eden as the progenitors of the human race.
In this sense, the speaker’s search ends with an unexpected discovery:
This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body
We circle silently about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he (71-77)
In his book Symposium, Plato runs over the origins of the myth to explain that:
the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word 'Androgynous' is only preserved as a term of reproach. (157)
The androgynous race consisted of a state of perfect harmony, until being separated by the gods in two halves (men and women), as Plato explains: "so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two, and healing the state of man [human being]" (158).
When the diver finally arrives at the wreck, "This is the place," the persona's essence is revealed. Adrienne Rich's speaker is an androgynous figure: "I am she: I am he." Its androgyny can be interpreted as a way Rich found to reestablish the supposed or desired harmony that existed before the wreck.
For Kevin Stein, the poem's diver
seeks nothing less than an understanding of the cultural battle and of how its history has determined the way men and women view their respective societal roles [. . .] Rich's diver desires to find the words that compose the vocabulary of power and thus control its means of distribution. (39)
This search for a vocabulary ends in the androgyny conceded to the diver. For Stein, "it is a measure of reconciliation [. . .] between men and women" (39). This idea is reinforced by the last lines of the poem in which the diver affirms to carry "a book of myths / in which / our names do not appear."
Keyes observes that: "If our names do not appear in the myths, they have no reality for us. If we are male-female, female-male, then pure "masculinity" is a myth; femininity likewise" (155). Wendy Martin extends the meaning of this androgyny beyond the sexual barriers. For her, this new human being dissolves the differences between "subject and object, mind and matter," (190) identified by her as a "Judeo-Christian heritage of a divided world where light is separated from darkness, earth from water, [. . .] a world in which mind is divorced from the body, spirit from matter, self from society" (190).
Anywise, the issue of androgyny presented by Rich as an alternative to diminish the pressure that the myth of sexual differentiation has exerted upon society seems to be a transitory alternative in her poetry. The idea reoccurs in the poem "The Stranger," in the same volume, in which she states that: "I am the androgyne." In this poem, beyond sexuality and myth, the theme is also related to language and the psychology of beings. Perhaps a reason for abandoning the androgyny idea is Rich's disillusion with the utopian possibilities of the androgyny, as the repeatedly quoted passage of the poem "Natural Resources," written 5 years later in 1977 demonstrates: "There are words I cannot choose again: / humanism androgyny" (134-135).
In her next book: Poems Selected and New 1950-1974, published in 1975, the poet seemed to reevaluate her poetic work, while she dedicated her time to prose texts. In its foreword, she cites difficulties faced by the woman who wrote the poems:
One task for the nineteen- or twenty-year-old poet who wrote the earliest poems here was to learn that she was neither unique nor universal, but a person in history, a woman and not a man, a white and also Jewish inheritor of a particular Western consciousness, from the making of which most women have been excluded. The learning of poetic craft was much easier than knowing what to do with it—with the powers, temptations, privileges, potential deceptions, and two-edged weapons of language.
I have never had much belief in the idea of the poet as someone of special sensitivity or spiritual insight, who rightfully lives above and off from the ordinary general life. (xv)
In 1976, Adrienne Rich published the prose treatise Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, a remarkable volume on women's liberation movements and, up to our days, Rich's best selling book, according to Amazon.com bookstore. Also in 1976, Adrienne Rich published Twenty-One Love Poems in a booklet edition and began life with the writer Michelle Cliff.
These "Twenty-One Love Poems" stamp her revelation as a lesbian poet and definitely discard the androgyny issue presented three years before. Thereby, if the intersections of Rich’s private life and her poetry are considered, the 1972 "androgyny" can be interpreted as a transitional phase between her husband's death in 1970 and the meeting of a homosexual love some years later. In addition, "Twenty-One Love Poems" mark Adrienne Rich's return to traditional aesthetic concerns. The 22 poems that compose the collection are constructed under the "patriarchal tradition of the Elizabethan love sonnet," (41) as Kevin Stein points out. Nevertheless, in Rich's typewriter the traditional heterosexual craft addresses a daring lesbian love.
(THE FLOATING POEM, UNNUMBERED)
Whatever happens with us, your body
will haunt mine—tender, delicate
your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond
of the fiddlehead fern in forests
just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs
between which my whole face has come and come—
the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there—
the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth—
your touch on me, firm, protective, searching
me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers
reaching where I had been waiting years for you
in my rose-wet cave—whatever happens, this is. (1-12)
Since Rich's poem does not strictly follow a classic structure, it is inferred that Rich subverts both form and content of what would be an "Elizabethan sonnet," in order to toughen in an outspoken and erotic way the theme of a lesbian love. When contrasted to Auden's review back in 1951, this book shows how Rich has profoundly changed. Although she returned to the use of artfully crafted poems, their themes are not moderated, nor respectful to their older, qualities Auden had praised in Rich's first volume. The poem above is a good example of Rich's boldness. Also, the fact of being unnumbered, although situated amid poems 14 and 15 concedes "The Floating Poem" a mobility to roam around the other 21 poems, which describe all phases of a relationship (from beginning to decline).
In this sense, "The Floating Poem" implicitly presents a kind of lesbian sexual elevated quality over the heterosexual, since its woman lyric self is able to recall her experiences vividly even when the relationship is over, bestowing on it a certain mobility. This mobility suggests not only the repetition of the love scene along the narrative, but its recurrence in the poet’s memory, regardless of "whatever happens" opening and closing the poem.
Carol Christ informs in her essay "Homesick for a Woman, for Ourselves: Adrienne Rich." that
women relationships take place within a world that has been defined for centuries by men and that only recently is beginning to be defined by women. In Rich’s vision, women’s relationships with men reveal men’s inability to feel, their fascination with power and control, while women’s relationships with women reveal energy that can transform a culture of power and death into a culture of life and rebirth. That Rich’s recent poetry has a political dimension has been obvious to serious readers of her poems—both to those who have found Rich’s politics annoying and distracting and to those who have found this element enlightening and exhilarating. That Rich’s poems also have a spiritual dimension has been less clearly recognized. (75)
When compared to "Rape," or "Phenomenology of Anger," poems in Diving into the Wreck, it is concluded that the political in these "Twenty-One Love Poems" is intrinsically connected to its form (for subverting a tradition) and lyric. Whereas in "Phenomenology of Anger," for instance, the persona directly threw dry offensive lines to "the enemy" (58): "I hate you / I hate the mask you wear, your eyes" (78-79). It works as if in "Phenomenology" what is said would be more important than how to say it, as if the anger could not coexist with a more elaborate lyricism as in her love sonnets.
In "Twenty-One Love Poems," both form and content increase the references to a lesbian love. Besides, there is no vindication or propaganda, men are not accused of crimes, nor hated, they are barely mentioned in the 22 poems. Instead, the speaker sings her love naturally, as a traditional romantic male poet would do, in the nineteenth century, backed by the sonnet frame. Thus, rather than screaming for equal rights, Rich wittily appropriates and undermines a male tradition to validate her praise for love between women.
In 1978, Adrienne Rich published The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977. In this volume, she republishes the Twenty-One Love Poems and the New poems from the 1975 collection along with other poems as "Power," "Natural Resources," and "A Woman Dead in her Forties." In "Power," the speaker analyses the Polish-born chemist and physicist Marie Curie, the first person to be awarded the Nobel Prize twice. She did pioneering research on radioactivity, and the poem examines the effects of this feat on her body:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power (6-17)
Wendy Martin identifies in "the long caesuras between phrases of the final sentence" an underscored "difficulty of Marie Curie's struggle—a triumph that, ultimately, killed her" (208). In this puzzling end, Rich may be making a reference to her own poetic career, in which wounds and sufferings came from the same source as her poetic power. Although she had not died of her wounds, some of the women that "lived inside her" (the undergraduate single girl, the wife, the mother) died or were transformed.
In her eleventh collection of poems, published in 1981, this ongoing transformation gains another facet. The very title — A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981— anticipates its content. The pronoun "this" in the title informs the reader of how "far" the poems in the book are from those conservative crafted poems in her first collection, since in this collection Rich increases her discussion on lesbianism and women-related issues in general.
In a sense, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (AWP) is in dialogue with concepts Rich presented in her essay "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," such as "lesbian existence" and "lesbian continuum." In the essay, published one year before AWP, Rich explains why she chose those terms. She says:
The word lesbianism has a clinical and limiting ring. Lesbian existence suggests both the fact of the historical presence of lesbians and [their] continuing creation of the meaning of that existence. I mean the term lesbian continuum to include a range—through each woman's life and throughout history—of woman-identified experience, not simply the fact that a woman has had or consciously desired genital sexual experience with another woman. (217)
Some of the poems in AWP reflect these further concepts on lesbian identity and show the distance Rich has traversed from her ideal of writing poems detached from a prior plan, as she expressed back in 1964. Rich tried to write these poems during the sixties and seventies and fully achieved her objective with the sophisticated lyricism of Twenty-One Love Poems, which reflected much of the "women-identified experience."
Claire Keyes observes that in AWP Rich’s spontaneity is under the influence of her prose writings against the "patriarchal evil." Keyes argues that Rich no longer evokes her poems to obtain knowledge, but conversely inputs knowledge and ideologies in her poems:
A Wild Patience no longer gives the sense that the poet knows what she knows "through making poems." [as affirmed in 1964] Competing with the knowledge gained from poems is a prior knowledge of patriarchal evil, "colonization," and the victimization of women—as in a poem like "Frame." Competing also is a commitment to a focus on women and women's concerns and to lesbianism. This specialization leads to poems about Ethel Rosenberg but not Julius [Rosenberg], about Willa Cather ("For Julia in Nebraska") because she was a lesbian, for "Mother-in-Law," "Heroines," "Grandmothers." Rich definitely chooses her subjects; one wonders if they ever choose her. (200)
Despite this criticism, Keyes recognizes a crack in this "prior plan" in the conclusion of "For Ethel Rosenberg," when the lyric self considers the limits of her feminist politics. Ethel Rosenberg was convicted and killed in the electric chair in 1953, with her husband, for conspiracy and espionage. Until its final stanzas, Rich is talking about language and power, and using her poetry to fuse personal and public spheres, as she appropriates facts in Ethel Rosenberg’s life for her own purposes.
Rich’s persona appropriates Rosenberg's history to speculate that, for example, she would have been
charged by posterity
not with selling secrets to the Communists
but with wanting to distinguish
herself being a bad daughter a bad sister (49-52)
The definitions of "bad" daughter and sister were provided by testimonies (i.e. a language used to accuse) that Rosenberg’s own mother and brother gave against her. This means that her death was provoked by lack of a language able to defend her. In Rich’s poetic version of the facts, Rosenberg was convicted by the oppressor’s language, incrusted in her own family, as the speaker says: "Her mother testifies against her / Her brother testifies against her" (62-63) and repeats: "her mother testifies against her / her sister-in-law testifies against her" (101-102).
In its last section, however, the persona imagines that Ethel survives her sentence. In this hypothetical escape from death, the persona admits that, in surviving, perhaps Ethel would not continue her activism in the way Rich imagined:
If I dare imagine her surviving
I must be fair to what she must have lived through
I must allow her to be at last
political in her ways not in mine
her urgencies perhaps impervious to mine
defining revolution as she defines it
or, bored to the marrow of her bones
with "politics"
bored with the vast boredom of long pain (110-118)
In these lines Rich admits that people can fail when submitted to great difficulties, adapting their conducts to avoid suffering. This thought is quite different from the heroic voice Rich’s poems presented in The Will to Change, for example, and points to a flexibility in Rich’s imagination that allows her to admit "that maybe the personal is not the political after all, for she imagines that Rosenberg might retreat," (201) as Keyes notes in the two last stanzas of the poem:
small; tiny in fact; in her late sixties
liking her room her private life
living alone perhaps
no one you could interview
maybe filling a notebook herself
with secrets she has never sold (119-124)
There is a lyric force in this closing which pervades a sign of maturity in Rich’s political view towards Ethel Rosenberg and in general. When Rich concedes her a lyric possibility of survival, Rosenberg is seen isolated in her own world. Such loneliness can be associated to both internal peace and indifference to the world’s questions.
Anywise, in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, after almost two decades (from 1963-1981) of a poetry intrinsically associated with feminism in several scopes, Rich’s women-centered thematic seems to achieve a limit. This does not imply stagnation, but a turn into a new stage. Hence, the next chapter discusses the later phase of Adrienne Rich’s career, from 1986 to 1999.
Contents Abstract Introduction Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Conclusion Bibliography Acknowledgments