Perhaps because of its pithy, if riddling, directness, the opening stanza of the last poem in An Atlas of the Difficult World, “Final Notations,” willed its way into my memory like a popular song. This shadow sonnet, with its intricate and entangled complexity, seemed to have come a far distance from the tidiness of the often-anthologized “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” a poem that appeared in her first collection. The open-ended pronoun “it” seemed as likely to land in “change” as in “poetry” or “life” or “childbirth”:
It will not be simple, it will not be long
it will take little time, it will take all your thought
it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath
it will be short, it will not be simple
As readers, when we are lucky, we can experience a poet’s changes through language over a lifetime. For me, these lines enacted Rich’s statement in “Images for Godard” (1970) that “the moment of change is the only poem.” Rich’s own transformations brought her closer to the ethical lives of her readers even as she wrote poems that at times lost patience with our culture’s inability to change with her.
Arriving at Radcliffe, the daughter of a Southern Protestant pianist mother and a Jewish doctor father, Rich initially excelled at being exceptional in accepted ways. Often working in traditional form in her early writing, she, even in these nascent poems, was already addressing the frustration of being constrained by forces that traditionally were not inclusive. Consequently, Rich was never primarily invested in traditional meter and form, though she employed them early on. Some of her earliest poems suggest she was already grasping toward what could not yet be described as “liberative language.” Her poems often found ways to critique existing expectations for one’s femininity and sexuality, and a decorum that did not include speaking her truth to power.
Rich began her public poetic career as the 1951 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first collection, A Change of World. W. H. Auden selected Rich’s volume and brought to the world’s attention Rich’s first thorny questions, embedded in lyrics, addressing a culture’s disengagement with its embattled selves. A poem like “A Clock in the Square,” published in that volume, finds its inspiration in a “handless clock” that refuses, rather than is unable, “to acknowledge the hour”:
This handless clock stares blindly from its tower,
Refusing to acknowledge any hour,
But what can one clock do to stop the game
When others go on striking just the same?
Whatever mite of truth the gesture held,
Time may be silenced but will not be stilled,
Nor we absolved by any one’s withdrawing
From all the restless ways we must be going
And all the rings in which we’re spun and swirled,
Whether around a clockface or a world.
The clock appears initially to be broken, but its handlessness proves an ineffective strategy against the “game.” Silence as a form of rebellion proves inadequate to the moment.
Auden praised A Change of World for, among other things, its “detachment from the self and its emotions,” as is demonstrated in “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” a poem that has always been coupled in my mind with Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Panther.” “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” projects freedom onto the image of the tigers the poem’s protagonist stitches into her needlework. This is in contrast to Rilke’s portrayal of the panther as imprisoned and behind bars. Rilke depicts the panther’s very will as having been paralyzed:
The padding gait of flexibly strong strides,
that in the very smallest circle turns,
is like a dance of strength around a center
in which stupefied a great will stands
Rich’s dialectical use of the tigers to contrast with the paralysis intrinsic to Aunt Jennifer’s domestic life speaks gently to her early “absolutist approach to the universe,” as she herself observed in a 1964 essay. She would come to understand society’s limits as touching all our lives. “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” ends with the quatrain:
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.
The tigers in the panel that she made
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
Those “terrified hands,” “ringed” and “mastered,” also could imagine and create a fantastical reflection of life, those tigers, that were “proud and unafraid.”
Rich came of age in a postwar America where civil rights and antiwar movements were either getting started or were on the horizon. Poets like Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, James Wright, and LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, among others, were abandoning the illusionary position of objectivity and finding their way to the use of the first person and gaining access to their emotional as well as political lives on the page. Rich’s reach for objectivity would be similarly short-lived.
Rich joined poets engaged in political-poetic resistance to the Vietnam War, as can be seen in “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” (1968), which includes lines like “Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton’s.” She began to elide traditions in order to speak from a more integrated history. “Even before I called myself a feminist or a lesbian,” Rich wrote in “Blood, Bread, and Poetry,” “I felt driven—for my own sanity—to bring together in my poems the political world ‘out there’—the world of children dynamited or napalmed, of the urban ghetto and militarist violence—and the supposedly private, lyrical world of sex and of male/female relationships.”
With Rich came the formulation of an alternate poetic tradition that distrusted and questioned paternalistic, hetero-normative, and hierarchical notions of what it meant to have a voice, especially for female writers. All of culture found its way into Rich’s poems, and as her work evolved, she made it almost impossible for any writers mentored by her poetry and essays to experience their own work as “sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own,” to quote from her foreword to the 1979 On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.
A dozen years after A Change of World was published, Rich would look back on her earlier work—which includes her second volume, The Diamond Cutters, and its metrical and imagistic tidiness—and admit that “in many cases I had suppressed, omitted, falsified even, certain disturbing elements, to gain that perfection of order.” This understanding that disruption seen and negotiated inside the poem might be closer to her actual experience of the world changed the content, form, and voice of her poetics. In her third collection, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), a restlessness settles into the poems that explore marriage and childrearing. It’s here the exasperation of a “thinking woman” begins the fight “with what she partly understood. / Few men about her would or could do more, / hence she was labeled harpy, shrew and whore,” as Rich writes in the title poem.
The 1970s saw the publication of some of Rich’s most memorable and powerful poems. She developed in her writing the appearance of the unadorned simplicity of a mind in rigorous thought. In a 1971 conversation with Stanley Plumly, Rich said she was “interested in the possibilities of the ‘plainest statement’ at times, the kind of things that people say to each other at moments of stress.” In poems like the groundbreaking “Diving into the Wreck,” Rich clearly chooses reality over myth in order to create room within the poems to confront what was broken in our common lives:
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
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
When Diving into the Wreck won the National Book Award in 1974, Rich accepted the prize in solidarity with fellow nominees Alice Walker and Audre Lorde:
The statement I am going to read was prepared by three of the women nominated for the National Book Award for poetry, with the agreement that it would be read by whichever of us, if any, was chosen.
We, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker, together accept this award in the name of all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world, and in the name of those who, like us, have been tolerated as token women in this culture, often at great cost and in great pain. We believe that we can enrich ourselves more in supporting and giving to each other than by competing against each other; and that poetry—if it is poetry—exists in a realm beyond ranking and comparison. We symbolically join together here in refusing the terms of patriarchal competition and declaring that we will share this prize among us, to be used as best we can for women. We appreciate the good faith of the judges for this award, but none of us could accept this money for herself, nor could she let go unquestioned the terms on which poets are given or denied honor and livelihood in this world, especially when they are women. We dedicate this occasion to the struggle for self-determination of all women, of every color, identification, or derived class: the poet, the housewife, the lesbian, the mathematician, the mother, the dishwasher, the pregnant teenager, the teacher, the grandmother, the prostitute, the philosopher, the waitress, the women who will understand what we are doing here and those who will not understand yet; the silent women whose voices have been denied us, the articulate women who have given us strength to do our work.
In 1997, over twenty years later, Rich declined the National Medal for the Arts, this country’s highest artistic honor, because she believed “the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.” In her July 3 letter to the Clinton administration and Jane Alexander, the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, she wrote:
I want to clarify to you what I meant by my refusal. Anyone familiar with my work from the early sixties on knows that I believe in art’s social presence—as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright. In my lifetime I have seen the space for the arts opened by movements for social justice, the power of art to break despair. Over the past two decades I have witnessed the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice in our country.
There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
Positioned as a teacher, as I often am now, at the front of a classroom, I was struck by reading a line in “Draft #2006” from Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. The line—“Maybe I couldn’t write fast enough. Maybe it was too soon.”—reminded me that this urgency, apprehension, and questioning has characterized all of Rich’s poems. Still it seems she responds in time, as she will always be once and future, and her work always relevant.
They asked me, is this time worse than another.
I said for whom?
Wanted to show them something.While I wrote on the
chalkboard they drifted out. I turned back to an empty room.
Maybe I couldn’t write fast enough.Maybe it was too soon.
In her Collected Poems 1950—2012 we have a chronicle of over a half century of what it means to risk the self in order to give the self, to refer back to Baldwin. As the poet Marilyn Hacker has written,
Rich’s body of work establishes, among other things, an intellectual autobiography, which is interesting not as the narrative of one life (which it’s not) and still less as intimate divulgence, but as the evolution and revolutions of an exceptional mind, with all its curiosity, outreaching, exasperation and even its errors.
One of our best minds writes her way through the changes that have brought us here, in all the places that continue to entangle our liberties in the twenty-first century. And here is not “somewhere else but here,” Rich writes. We remain in “our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, / its own way of making people disappear.”
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.
EDITOR’S NOTE
This is the first collection of Adrienne Rich’s poetry to be published without her active involvement. However, in certain ways it is based on similar collected works that she edited at intervals over the course of her career. She undertook the last of these in the year leading up to her death in 2012—going through all the work she’d published since The Will to Change in 1971 and adding ten new poems to create Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012.
Rich had already gone through this process several times during the previous fifty years: looking through the books of poetry she had published up to that point to choose representative work for a volume of “selected” poems. In 1975, just a year after her pivotal book Diving into the Wreck, W. W. Norton published the first such volume, Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974. Nearly ten years later, in 1984, she repeated the process with The Fact of a Doorframe, followed in 1993 by Collected Early Poems 1950–1970, which consists of the full text of her first six books.
In each case, along with selections from earlier books, she chose what she called “uncollected” work: poems that she had previously held back or had only published in magazines but never included in a book. She also added new work; important poems like “The Fact of a Doorframe” and “From an Old House in America” first appeared in Poems: Selected and New. In the foreword to that book, she described her selection as “the graph of a process still going on,” a statement equally true of The Fact of a Doorframe when it was first published in 1984 and also when she updated it for W. W. Norton more than fifteen years later.
Those books are the basis for the present collection, except that now nothing has been omitted: all of Rich’s published poetry appears here in one volume, including all of the uncollected poems. Explanatory notes that she provided for some of her poems are compiled and appear here in a single section at the back. There were a few instances where she changed words or lines in an earlier poem when preparing to include it in one of the “selected” books. These alterations were described in her notes, and this collection preserves the later versions.
Except for Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012, she also wrote short forewords for each of the “selected” volumes, describing how she made her selections and offering an account of her experience as the person who wrote those poems and of the world in which she found herself at work. The forewords are often self-critical, and they emphasize her place in a wider current of language, poetry, and events. These short essays aren’t includ
ed in the present book, but some information from them, specific to individual poems, is incorporated into the endnotes of the present collection.
In omitting any appendix of drafts or discarded poems, this volume respects Rich’s own directions regarding the papers she donated to Radcliffe’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women. There she notes that over the years, in collecting poems for her books, she had “weeded out work I felt was not to my own standards or was repetitive,” and specifies that those discards and drafts are not for publication.
However, the otherwise “uncollected” poems that appeared only in Poems: Selected and New, The Fact of a Doorframe, and Collected Early Poems are all here. Likewise, the major poems from the late 1970s and early 1980s that she left out of her final selected volume—“From an Old House in America,” “Transcendental Etude,” and “Natural Resources”—can now be read in their fullest possible context.
Elements of typography and page design varied over the years from one book to another and are here made uniform. But I have tried to preserve as nearly as possible the structure of each book as it appeared for the first time, including all dedications and epigraphs, as well as the division of poems into separate numbered sections.
Even after she submitted her book manuscripts, Rich continued to work with tremendous care and precision, collaborating with her editors, book designers, proofreaders, and everyone else at W. W. Norton associated with her work over thirty-one volumes of poetry and prose. In assembling Collected Poems, I benefited from her example and from the collaboration of a publisher with a deep connection to this body of work.
I grew up hearing the keystrokes and carriage returns of my mother’s typewriter as she worked on some of these poems. Some I saw for the first time when they arrived enclosed with her letters and some I first heard in her own voice at public readings. In editing this collection, I was struck over and over by how these poems change in sound and meaning when read at different times and in different settings. This is Adrienne Rich’s poetry from over sixty years, and although it’s now gathered under one cover, the poems continue to breathe, reaching forward to find new and different readers.
Collected Poems Page 3
