Collected Poems

by Adrienne Rich

  Camino Real “Can you afford not to make / the magical study / which happiness is?”: From Charles Olson, “Variations Done for Gerald Van der Wiele,” in Charles Olson, Selected Poems, ed. Robert Creeley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 83.

  “George Oppen to June Degnan: …”: See George Oppen, The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), p. 212.

  “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” The title of the poem is that of a composition played by John Coltrane on the album Coltrane’s Sound, Atlantic Jazz, 1964.

  Section 5, lines 10–12: “… the Lordly Hudson / … which has no peer / in Europe or the East”: From Paul Goodman, “The Lordly Hudson,” in The Lordly Hudson (New York: Macmillan, 1962), p. 7.

  Section 6, lines 9–10: “—Where do you come from?— / —Como tú, like you, from nothing—”: See Jack Aguëros, Introduction, Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos, comp. and trans. Jack Aguëros (Willimantic, Conn.: Curbstone Press, 1997), p. xxv.

  Section 8, line 4: “through interboro fissures of the mind”: From Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” Part VII: “The Tunnel,” line 71.

  Section 8, line 9. In “The Bridge,” Crane hallucinated Edgar Allan Poe in the New York subway; I conjure Crane, Miles Davis, Muriel Rukeyser, Julia de Burgos, and Paul Goodman, or their descendants.

  A Long Conversation “energy: Eternal Delight”: See William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 4: “The Voice of the Devil.”

  “Maybe this is the beginning of madness …”: See Osip Mandelstam: Selected Poems, trans. Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin (New York: Atheneum, 1974), p. 95.

  “The bourgeoisie cannot exist … its own image”: See Karl Marx, “Manifesto of the Communist Party” (1848), in The Portable Karl Marx, ed. Eugene Kamenka (New York: Penguin, 1983), pp. 207–8. “In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e., capital. …” Ibid., p. 211. See also Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Modern Edition, intro. Eric Hobsbawm (London and New York: Verso, 1998).

  “—It isn’t nations anymore …”: Suggested by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Civil Wars: From L.A. to Bosnia (New York: New Press, 1993).

  “What is the use of studying philosophy …”: See Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 39.

  “small tradespeople … of the population”: See Marx, p. 212.

  “At the risk of appearing ridiculous”: See Che Guevara, Che Guevara Reader: Writings on Guerrilla Strategy, Politics and Revolution, ed. David Deutschmann (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 1997), p. 211: “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love” (“Socialism and Man in Cuba,” 1965).

  “the memory of traditions of mercy …”: See interview with Aijaz Ahmad, in In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda, ed. Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997), p. 111: “… we certainly need the most rigorous of theories but we also need to have memories of the traditions of mercy and the struggles for justice. It is only there that any true reconciliation of the universal and the particular is really possible.”

  “the eye has become a human eye …”: Marx, p. 151.

  “the Arts, you know …”: Richard M. Nixon, taped in 1972, quoted in Robert Penn Warren, Democracy and Poetry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), p. 36.

  “ ‘This is for you …’ ”: After Georges Brassens’s “Chanson pour l’Auvergnat,” recorded by Juliette Greco on her album 10 Ans de Chansons, Phillips, 1962.

  FOX

  The lines in Spanish in the dedication are from Violeta Parra’s “Gracias a la Vida”.

  Nora’s Gaze Alludes to works by the painter Nora Jaffe (1928–1994). See Clayton Eshleman, “Nora’s Roar,” in his From Scratch (Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow Press, 1998), pp. 31–49.

  Messages Blaise Pascal (1623–1662): Le silence éternel de ces espaces m’affraye (“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me”). See Pensées of Blaise Pascal, trans. W. F. Trotter, Everyman’s Library, no. 874 (London: Dent, 1948), p. 61.

  Manzanar Site of the first War Relocation Center activated in World War II for the internment of Japanese Americans, Manzanar is located east of the Sierra Nevada range and northeast of Death Valley.

  Twilight Brownington, Vermont, is the site of the “Old Stone House” completed in 1836 as a dormitory for the Orleans County Grammar School. Its architect and builder, African American Alexander Lucius Twilight, served as principal of the school for most of its existence (“The Old Stone House Museum” [Orleans, Vt.: Orleans County Historical Society, 1996]). A working granite quarry still operates in Barre, Vermont.

  Noctilucent Clouds “Several times in the last few months, observers in the lower 48 have seen ‘noctilucent clouds,’ which develop about 50 miles above the earth’s surface—clouds so high that they reflect the sun’s rays long after nightfall. … [G]lobal warming seems to be driving them toward the equator. … In retrospect it will be clear.” Bill McKibben, “Indifferent to a Planet in Pain,” New York Times, September 4, 1999, sec. A.

  “Usonian:” The term used by Frank Lloyd Wright for his prairie-inspired American architecture.

  Terza Rima Section 3: Vivo nel non volare … : “I live in the failed will / of the post-war time / loving the world I hate”—Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Le Ceneri di Gramsci,” in Lawrence R. Smith, ed. and trans., The New Italian Poetry, 1945 to the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), pp. 80–81. See also Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poems, selected and trans. Norman MacAfee and Luciano Martinengo (London: John Calder, 1982), pp. 10–11.

  Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot “ ‘The mystai streamed’ toward [the Telestrion].” C. Kerényi, Eleusis, trans. Ralph Manheim, Bollingen series 65, vol. 4 (New York: Bollingen Foundation/Pantheon, 1967), p. 82.

  THE SCHOOL AMONG THE RUINS

  Tell Me “remembered if outlived / as freezing”: Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), no. 341.

  “harrowed in defeats of language”: Michael Heller, “Sag Harbor, Whitman, As If an Ode,” in Wordflow: New and Selected Poems (Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman House, 1997), p. 129.

  “in history to my barest marrow”: Black Salt: Poems by Édouard Glissant, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), p. 33.

  This evening let’s “friendship is not a tragedy”: See June Jordan, “Civil Wars” (1980), in Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 267.

  Delivered Clean “Delivered vacant” is a developer’s phrase for a building for sale whose tenants have already been evicted. See Rebecca Solnit, Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism (New York: Verso, 2000), p. 158.

  Transparencies “we are truely sorry …”: Clyde Haberman, “Palestinians Reclaim Their Town after Israelis Withdraw,” New York Times, August 31, 2001, p. A6.

  Collaborations dimdumim: Hebrew for “dawn,” “dusk,” “twilight.”

  “what thou lovest well …”: See Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos (London: Faber & Faber, 1959), p. 112: “what thou lovest well remains … cannot be reft from thee.”

  “what does not change …”: See Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers,” in his Selected Poems (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 5: “What does not change / is the will to change.”

  “the fascination with what’s easiest …”: See W. B. Yeats, “The Fascination of What’s Difficult,” in his Collected Poems, 2nd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1950), p. 104.

  Alternating Current The Villa Grimaldi outside Santiago, formerly a military officers’ club, was converted to a detention and torture facility during the Pinochet regime in Chile. It is now a memorial park honoring the victims of torture.

  V “If some long unborn friend …”:
Muriel Rukeyser, “Tree of Days,” in Muriel Rukeyser, Selected Poems, ed. Adrienne Rich (New York: Library of America, 2004), p. 69.

  After Apollinaire & Brassens Derived from Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem “Le Pont Mirabeau” and Georges Brassens’s song “Le Pont des Arts.”

  Slashes “October ’17 / May ’68 / September ’73”: October 1917 marked the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, a determinative event in twentieth-century history. May 1968 saw massive popular U.S. opposition to the war in Vietnam, linked with the movement for Black civil rights and with anticolonial struggles abroad; in France there were uprisings of workers and students. On September 11, 1973, in Chile, a military coup under General Augusto Pinochet backed by the CIA violently seized power from the elected Socialist government of Salvador Allende.

  “In wolf-tree, see the former field”: See Anne Whiston Spirn, The Language of Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 18–19: “A ‘wolf’ tree is a tree within a woods, its size and form, large trunk and horizontal branches, anomalous to the environs of slim-trunked trees with upright branches … a clue to the open field in which it once grew alone, branches reaching laterally to the light and up.”

  Dislocations: Seven Scenarios Section 5: “You thought you were innocent …”: See Paul Nizan, Aden Arabie (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1968), p. 131.

  Five O’Clock, January 2003 “most glorious creature on earth”: See Robinson Jeffers, “Ninth Anniversary,” in The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers, ed. Albert Gelpi (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 52: “there the most glorious / Creature on earth shines in the nights or glitters in the suns, / Or feels of its stone in the blind fog.”

  TELEPHONE RINGING IN THE LABYRINTH

  Epigraphs on page 972 from Alan Davies, review of Brenda Iijima’s Around Sea (Oakland, Calif.: O Books, 2004), in St. Mark’s in the Bowery Poetry Newsletter (April/May 2004), used by permission of Alan Davies; and from Michael S. Harper, Songlines in Michaeltree: New and Collected Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

  Calibrations Landstuhl: American military hospital in Germany.

  “You go to war with the army you have.” U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, December 2004.

  Melancholy Piano (extracts) This translation was published as part of an international poetry project by the Quebec literary magazine Estuaire and the New Review of Literature (Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles) with Quebecois and Anglophone-American poets translating poems by their counterparts.

  Élise Turcotte’s works include Sombre Ménagerie (Montreal: Éditions du Noroît, 2002) and Diligence (Longueuil: Les Petits Villages, 2004). Her novel The Alien House (Toronto: Cormorant Books, 2004), translated into English by Sheila Fischman, received the Canadian Governor General’s Prize.

  Improvisation on Lines from Edwin Muir’s “Variations on a Time Theme” See Edwin Muir, Collected Poems, 1921–1951 (London: Faber & Faber, 1952), and John C. Weston, ed., Collected Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, rev. ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1967).

  Hubble Photographs: After Sappho For Sappho, see Greek Lyric, I: Sappho, Alcaeus, trans. David A. Campbell, Loeb Classical Library 142 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982–), fragment 16, pp. 66–67: “Some say a host of cavalry, others of infantry, and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing on the black earth, but I say it is whatsoever a person loves. … I would rather see her lovely walk and the bright sparkle of her face than the Lydians’ chariots and armed infantry.”

  This Is Not the Room U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney, on NBC’s Meet the Press, September 16, 2001: “we also have to work, though, sort of, the dark side … use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”

  Rereading The Dead Lecturer See LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), The Dead Lecturer: Poems (New York: Grove, 1967).

  Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender, or Judged Unfit to Send Passages in quotes are from Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary, trans. Tom Nairn (New York: Verso, 1990), pp. 31, 239; Antonio Gramsci, Prison Letters, ed. and trans. Hamish Henderson (London: Pluto Press, 1996), p. 135; and Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigeig, trans. Joseph A. Buttigeig and Antonio Callari, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), p. 213.

  Draft #2006 Part vi: “Out of sight, out of mind”: See Carolyn Jones, “Battle of the Beds,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 2005, p. A-I.

  TONIGHT NO POETRY WILL SERVE

  Waiting for Rain, for Music “Send my roots rain”: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections, ed. Catherine Phillips, The Oxford Authors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 183.

  “A struggle at the roots of the mind”: Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 212.

  Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time “For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors”: Simone Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force (1940), trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle Hill, 1956), p. 3.

  “Delusion / a daughter”: See Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 394–95, bk. 19, lines 91–130.

  “Horses turn away their heads / weeping”: Homer, pp. 365–66, bk. 17, lines 426–40.

  Fracture “it would be strange not to forgive”: “Essentially all this is crude and meaningless … as an avalanche which involuntarily rolls down a mountain and overwhelms people. But when one listens to music, all this is: that some people lie in their graves and sleep, and that one woman is alive … and the avalanche seems no longer meaningless, since in nature everything has a meaning. And everything is forgiven, and it would be strange not to forgive”: Anton Chekhov, Notebook of Anton Chekhov, trans. S. S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1921).

  Turbulence “O the mind, mind has mountains, cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer … Hold them cheap / May he who ne’er hung there”: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections, ed. Catherine Phillips, The Oxford Authors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 167.

  I was there, Axel “The Blue Ghazals.” See “The Blue Ghazals,” pages 307–12.

  Ballade of the Poverties This revival of an old form owes inspiration to François Villon, The Poems of François Villon, ed. and trans. Galway Kinnell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).

  Black Locket “It lies in ‘the way of seeing the world’…”: Laura Betti, ed., Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Future Life (Italy: Associazione “Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini,” 1989), pp. 19–20.

  Generosity The books mentioned are James Scully, Raging Beauty: Selected Poems (Washington, D.C.: Azul Editions, 1994), and René Char, Lettera Amorosa (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), with illustrations by Georges Braque and Jean Arp.

  Powers of Recuperation “the massive figure on unrest’s verge.” See Melencolia I, a 1514 engraving by Albrecht Dürer. The “I” is thought to refer to “Melencolia Imaginativa,” one of three types of melancholy described by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535).

  INDEX OF TITLES AND FIRST LINES

  Page numbers listed correspond to the print edition of this book. You can use your device’s search function to locate particular terms in the text.

  A balcony, violet shade on stucco fruit in a plastic bowl on the iron, 908

  A blue-grained line circles a fragment of the mind, 421

  Abnegation, 254

  A body, blind with sleep, 211

  Absence is homesick. Absence wants a home, 666

  Absent-Minded Are Always to Blame, The, 114

  Accountability, 210

  A child’s hand smears a wall the reproof is bitter, 975


  A clear night if the mind were clear, 537

  A conversation begins, 455

  A cracked walk in the garden, 233

  A crime of nostalgia, 1084

  Across a city from you, I’m with you, 473

  A dark woman, head bent, listening for something, 709

  Address, 923

  A dead mosquito, flattened against a door, 282

  A deluxe blending machine, 938

  A fogged hill-scene on an enormous continent, 451

  After Apollinaire & Brassens, 945

  After a Sentence in “Malte Laurids Brigge,” 116

  After Dark, 185

  After the sunlight and the fiery vision, 19

  After Twenty Years, 363

  Afterwake, The, 135

  Afterward, 16

  A girl looks through a microscope her father’s, 1051

  A girl wanders with a boy into the woods, 739

  A good man, 151

  Ailanthus, goldenrod, scrapiron, what makes you flower?, 178

  Air without Incense, 11

  A knight rides into the noon, 111

  A life hauls itself uphill, 816

  All changed now through neglect. The steps dismantled, 44

  Alleged Murderess Walking in Her Cell, The, 417

  All in the day that I was born, 103

  All month eating the heart out, 249

  All that can be unknown is stored in the black screen of a broken, 889

  All winter you went to bed early, drugging yourself on War and, 665

  A locomotive pushing through snow in the mountains, 994

  Along the coastal waters, signals run, 14

  Alternating Current, 935

  Always the Same, 152

  A man, a woman, a city, 308

  A man in terror of impotence, 391

  A man lies under a car half bare, 983

  A man walking on the street, 667

  Amends, 758