Adrienne_Rich

Relevant Background Adrienne Rich was born into a well-off, professional family in 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.A. Adrienne was the elder of two daughters. Her father was a medical doctor and pathology professor and her mother was a music composer and pianist. She grew up with an awareness of tension at home between the religious and cultural heritage of her father's Jewish background and her mother's southern Protestant background. Rich recalls being dominated by her father while growing up. He taught Rich to write poetry, but there were growing tensions as he expected her to conform to his formal and traditional ideas of poetry. Eventually Rich broke free of her father’s influence and composed poems that reflected on the domestic and everyday reality of her life. She refused to believe that poetry could be divorced from daily life. Rich has published over twenty volumes of poems and essays, edited influential lesbian-feminist journals, and lived a lifetime of campaigning for issues. In 1951, Rich graduated from university and also won the much esteemed Yale Younger Poet’s Prize for her first volume of poetry: ‘A Change of World’. The poet, W. H. Auden, the judge of the award, praised Rich's elegant technique, traditional and formal approach, and restrained emotional content. Rich's early poems showed the influence of great male poets: Frost, Yeats, Stevens and Auden. Ironically this contributed to her early renown as a poet. Rich gradually developed a distinctive poetic voice, reflecting on her experience as a woman feeling oppressed by inequality. While certain poetic movements have concentrated on the isolated inner self, or on the exquisite delight of exercising the craft of poetry, in isolation from worldly concerns, Adrienne Rich has always written poems on great public themes. Her voice is consciously public, as a witness, commentator and advocate for change. Before evolving her more challenging social ideas and experimental methods, Rich as a young poet mocked the notion of private Art in ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’. Rich’s creative instinct was issue driven as much as it was poetic. She mocked meaningless art for art’s sake in ‘Living in Sin’. Here she humorously depicted an artist living a bohemian life style, as he mass-produced pretty but stale still life paintings. Rich contrasted her idea of light delineating a realistic still life of the squalor of his apartment with his quickly conjured and pretty efforts. Thus she mocked so-called art that stuck to a trusted formula. In 1953, Rich married Alfred Conrad, a Harvard economist, and moved to Massachusetts, where she gave birth to three sons in the next five years. She became troubled by a conflict between her role of mother and being a poet. She experienced tensions over what was expected of her sexually and over her desire for a creative role through art. Around 1960 these were not yet publicly recognised or named issues. As a result she admitted she felt "monstrous" over her inability to conform. Rich's third book Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), was a watershed in her poetic development. Her language and style were freer, as evidenced by ‘The Roofwalker’. Her poetic voice became more intimate and she chose the male way of constructing a world as her context for writing in. Rich began to express feelings and create images around the themes of how language shapes us, limitations, struggle, escape, and choice: ‘A life I didn't choose/chose me’ [The Roofwalker]. Around this time the emerging debates and rebellions of the 1960s including the civil rights movements, the antiwar movement and the women's movement mirrored and addressed Rich’s feelings of personal conflict, sexual alienation, and cultural oppression. Rich’s writings contributed considerably to this revolutionary ferment. In 1966, Rich taught in an English program for poor, black, and emigrant students. This experience opened her mind to the connection between language and power. Rich fell under the influence of radical writers like Simone De Beauvoir and James Baldwin. She actively campaigned for gay and lesbian rights, reproductive freedom, and for the progressive Jewish movement. Rich’s poetry focused with an increasingly critical eye on militarism, homophobia and sexual identity, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, the use of language as a means of power and thought, various other ways of exercising of power and women's role within and beyond marriage. The latter three themes are found in abundance within the syllabus selection. As a result of her poetry, essays, campaigning and lecturing, Adrienne Rich has had a huge influence on the women's movement in America for the last half century. A poem like ‘Trying To Talk With A Man’ is a good illustration of Rich the pioneering feminist. This experimental form of poem uses her private life and her husband’s trouble with her new expectations to create a feminist parable. The voice in the poem, like in many of her creations, is choric, publicly singing out a description of a situation and urging her comments on the listener. Her rhythms and images grew more informal and contemporary as her career progressed. She tried to imitate the cinematic techniques of jump cuts and collage, as illustrated in her poem ‘Power’. This method gave rise to what some have written about as her ‘stream of consciousness’ technique. Rich, by her own admission, set out ‘to write directly and overtly as a woman, out of a woman's body and experience.’ In the poem ‘Tear Gas’, not on the course, Rich claims: ‘The will to change begins in the body not in the mind/My politics is in my body.’ Rich’s poetic vision is full of commitment. The speaker in most of her poems is herself as poet where she gives witness to her experience of life. As a positive resume of her life, one could claim her mission is to speak for the powerless, especially to overcome denial and inequality in women’s lives. A darker resume might murmur that Rich writes like she is the first poet laureate of her self-styled post-gender era: ‘I am she: I am he’—Diving Into The Wreck. Her poetry has been honored with the National Book Award in 1974 for ‘Diving into the Wreck’ (which she accepted jointlywith two other poets in the name of all women who are silenced). Rich once refused to accept a Presidential medal as a protest against cutting funding to the arts for minorities. She has recieved two Guggenheim Fellowships, the first Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Brandeis Creative Arts Medal, the Common Wealth Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the National Poetry Association Award for Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry. Themes 1. Breaking Free From The Past: Change Adrienne Rich foresaw, witnessed and tried to force/lead social change from the middle of the twentieth century. The early Rich speaks mockingly of an era of ‘chivalric certainty’/ in which women are ‘mastered’ in marriage [AJT] . She satirises the hankering of traditionalist males for a ‘calmer age passed on’ [TUSITDR] as they look with askance from their balcony at social unrest, perhaps women preparing to throw stones through their frail patriarchal glass barrier. In ‘Storm Warnings’ a description of a hurricane becomes an extended metaphor for inevitable change: ‘How with a single purpose time has travelled By the secret currents of the undiscerned’ [SW]. The poem predicts how new ideas will overpower the old. ‘Between foreseeing and averting change Lies all the mastery of elements’ [SW]. In ‘The Roofwalker’ Rich speaks of change caused by destinies that don’t fit: ‘A life I didn’t choose chose me’ [TR] American society’s prescription for subservient womanhood doesn’t match how Adrienne Rich imagines her life to be. Rich dismisses the ‘infinite exertion’ of those who constructed traditional social models and in its place she predicts coming social changes, including a comical retreat by men as they nakedly flee. In ‘Our Whole Life’, Rich labels the traditional ideas behind her marriage and the social contract as a set of ‘permissible fibs’ [OWL]. Rich sees human history as a ‘knot of lies’ that eats itself [OWL] or as ‘dead letters’ written in the ‘oppressor’s language’ [OWL]. Rich seems to be encouraging social revolution against the ‘oppressor’. The image of the fleeing Algerian, ‘his whole body a cloud of pain’ [OWL] may suggest that change in the form of freeing oneself or one’s society from the past is painful: ‘there are no words for this except himself’ [OWL]. In ‘Trying to Talk With a Man’ Rich compares powerful forces for change to ‘an underground river forcing its way between deformed cliffs’ [TTTWAM]. This momentum for change is compared to detonating atom bombs in a desert, a barren war-free zone. The imagery carries the implication that even the dialogue about change, as well as any changes that follow, may be devastating. ‘You mention the danger’ [TTTWAM]. The desert also frees the couple from the intimate clutter of the past, the baggage as listed in the second stanza: ‘whole LP collections…’ [TTTWAM]. By the end of the poem, Rich experiences an epiphany. She decides to let the marriage go, to break free of its uneven and warped power structure, lucidly recognising that denial seems to have been the norm before that moment: ‘Everything we were saying until now was an effort to blot it out’ [TTTWAM]. The barren silence between them dooms the attempt to change it together and perhaps salvage the marriage: ‘surrounded by a silence that sounds like the silence of the place except that it came with us and is familiar’ [TTTWAM]. Her partner, the ‘Man’ of the title, responds to her attempt to confront the truth by pacing the floor, warning of the danger this dialogue posed to their faltering marriage. This justifies the muted sarcasm of the word ‘trying’ in the title. Their marriage refuses the test, and must either remain in its past form, impossible, or explode like an atom bomb. The intimate and the nuclear become one. As they face a state of change, crisis looms. In a manner that seems to mock both, heterosexual and nuclear bonds devastate. They both explode at crisis point. In ‘Diving into the Wreck’, Rich compares examining the past to exploring a sunken wreck. Genders seem to merge in this exploration. ‘She’ blends with ‘he’. Through seeing ‘the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail’ the poet hopes to achieve the ultimate change. Whether the change means gender equality, a new era in which only the female gender is relevant or a post gender era is to begin, it is for the reader to decide. The ‘treasures’ probably refer to good attributes of women that have been hidden, but have not been destroyed in the wrecked patriarchal structure of traditional society. The poet bitterly reflects on women as the ‘half-destroyed instruments’ of atavistic [traditional and backward] society. She implies that women’s inner sense of direction or ‘compass’ has been fouled by historical rules and traditions, a fact hidden by the myths of normal society. She is set on changing this in a radical way. Hence, she dwells repeatedly and with some humour on the image of the knife. In ‘From a Survivor’ the mature Rich seems to be reflecting on her marriage, ‘pact’. Her understanding of it changed as society and culture changed around her. The poem traces the evolution of her self-awareness as a woman to the point where the original marriage pact, with her as wife, collapsed. She grew disillusioned, as she became aware of the ‘power’ wielded by her ‘God’ like husband. She senses the tragedy of her husband’s suicide resulted from his inability to change, to make the ‘leap’. The continuous changes, as she has experienced them, are not just a leap, but ‘a succession of brief, amazing movements each one making possible the next’ [FAS]. This is a joyful epiphany of liberating changes. Changes are no longer mutterings of the future, ‘follies that subside’ [TUSITDR], but joyously lived moments of liberation from the pacts made in the past, from the power of others over her. In ‘Power’, Rich contrasts Marie Curie a modern agent of change, an inventor, with a traditional, ineffective and bogus ‘cure’ found in ‘the earth deposits of our history’ [P]. Curie, a force for change, is a martyr or self-sacrificial victim for progress, destroyed by radiation, but also by the expectations of those [ males] who empowered her. ‘her body bombarded for years by the element she had purified… her wounds came from the same source as her power’ [P]. 2. The Poet as Feminist/Disillusionment with and Contempt for the Male/A Conscious Woman’s Survival in an Unequal Society/The Battle Against Male Power The poems of Adrienne Rich trace the evolution of her feminist ideals from her youthful unease with male dominance to her new ideology, which is a vision of society free of male domination, perhaps a society where the genders coalesce. In her early poems Rich mocks male dominance, while in her later poems she asserts her independence. Rich mocks male dominance through the image of ‘the massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band’ [AJF]. The life of Aunt Jennifer is defined as a life of ‘ordeals’ set by her husband, casting him in the role of stern authority figure and villain. Rich scorns the way traditional males dismiss the push for equality: ‘These are follies that subside’ [TUSITDR]. She satirises male complacency towards women’s emancipation: ‘None as yet dare lift an arm’ [TUSITDR]. Rich mocks the haughty aloofness of males in the past: ‘When our grandsire stood aghast To see his antique ruby bowl Shivered in a thunder-roll’ [TUSITDR]. The word ‘shivered’ shows how vain the male ancestor was regarding prized material possessions. It suggests a lack of compassion for the downtrodden. In ‘Living in Sin’ Rich portrays a bohemian artist as manipulative lover, indulging in art, smoking and drinking while expecting his female lover to attend to menial domestic duties: ‘she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming like a relentless milkman’ [LIS]. In ‘The Roofwalker’ Rich mocks men as constructors of a world that will never be completed. In fact they will soon have to flee like ‘shadows on a burning deck’ [TR]. In ‘Our Whole Life’ Rich refers with contempt to male dominance, suggesting that the language of everyday discourse with male partners consists of a knot of lies and ‘dead letters…rendered into the oppressor’s language’ [OWL]. In ‘Trying to Talk with a Man’ the title implies that the speaker’s husband is remote and superior, too smug to engage with her. It is possible to read this poem as protest against her loss of individuality in marriage. The speaker feels ‘more helpless with’ her husband than without him. She feels alienated from her male partner as he looks at her with increasing amazement: ‘Your eyes are stars of a different magnitude’ [TTTWAM]. Although the speaker is the one who tries to face the problem in their relationship, the husband seems to regard the speaker as the problem: ‘You look at me like an emergency’ [TTTWAM]. Passion no longer exists between them: ‘Your dry heat feels like power’. [TTTWAM]. Thus, as a body of poems, the syllabus selections imply that Rich sought emancipation from male oppression. 3. Power In the syllabus selection, Rich mainly addresses power issues like male dominance in the world of science, male dominance over women and male wielding of the means of power in society. In ‘Storm-Warnings’ Rich’s imagery focuses on control and seems critical of the vanity of science, probably, in her eyes, a male dominated echelon. ‘Time in the hand is not control of time’ [SW]. The poem proclaims that the power of nature is superior to human instruments: ‘Between foreseeing and averting change Lies all the mastery of elements Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter’ [SW]. Rich scoffs at the vanity of man’s pretence at mastering the elements through the image of ‘shattered fragments of an instrument’ [SW]. In ‘Trying To Talk With A Man’ the imagery implies a criticism of ‘the danger’ of misusing science for military purposes: ‘Out in this desert we are testing bombs’ [TTTWAM]. Here, the image of ‘deformed cliffs’ demonstrates, in a subliminal way, the consequences of abusing atomic power. In ‘Diving Into The Wreck’ Rich’s imagery, on one level, implies that science must bow to the forces of nature: ‘we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water eaten log the fouled compass’ [DITW] In ‘Power’ Rich ironically accuses the male establishment of creating a climate in which the pioneering female scientist, Curie, was destroyed by her own invention: ‘denying her wounds came from the same source as her power’ [P]. Presumably, in this dig at patriarchy, Marie Curie is portrayed as a heroic victim, a gender sacrifice to the male scientific establishment. ‘Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers’ and ‘The Uncle Speaks In The Drawing Room’ are both satires on male dominance in society. While Aunt Jennifer’s tigers ‘do not fear the men beneath the tree’, clearly she does: ‘When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie Still ringed with the ordeals she was mastered by’ [AJT] Rich ridicules the uncle’s obsession with guarding his privileges and trappings of power: ‘How these treasures handed down From a calmer age passed on Are in the keeping of our kind’ [TUSITDR]. In ‘Living in Sin’, Rich mocks the sense of power, the egoism, of the bohemian male artist: ‘…had risen at his urging’ [LIS] He can spawn clichéd paintings, ‘a plate of pears’, at will—but he abides in domestic disorder until he takes advantage of a star-struck socialite. The ambiguous title implies that male exploitation of females is the real sin. As her poetry develops, Rich seems to experience personal empowerment, especially in an epiphany: ‘a succession of brief, amazing movements each on making possible the next’ [FAS]. Here Rich expresses her exhilaration at surviving the power imbalance of marriage by ending it. Self-empowerment is a theme of ‘Diving Into The Wreck’: ‘the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone’. Casting aside ‘the book of myths’ is essential to personal empowerment. In ‘Our Whole Life’ Rich attacks the negative exercise of power in marriage and society at large through misuse of language: ‘All those dead letters rendered into the oppressor’s language’ [OWL]. In ‘Trying To Talk With A Man’, Rich scoff’s at her husband’s unwillingness to enter into her attempt to rebalance the power structure of their marriage: ‘Your dry heat feels like power’ [TTTWAM]. Here, more briefly, are a series of other themes, with the quotes merely listed. 4. Relationships/Marriage ‘the massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band’ [AJF]. ‘ordeals she was mastered by’ [AJF]. ‘…jeered by the minor demons… By evening she was back in love again though not so wholly’ [LIS]. ‘A life I didn’t choose chose me’ [TR]. ‘Our whole life a translation the permissible fibs and now a knot of lies…’ [OWL] ‘surrounded by a silence that sounds like the silence of the place except that it came with us and is familiar… everything we were saying until now was an effort to blot it out… Out here I feel more helpless with you than without you Your dry heat feels like power’ [TTTWAM]. ‘the story of the wreck… I am she… Whose breasts still bear the stress’ [DITW]. ‘The pact that we made was the ordinary pact of men and women in those days… I don’t know who we thought we were that our personalities could resist the failures of the race… like everyone else we thought of ourselves as special… your body is as vivid to me as it ever was… it is no longer the body of a god or anything with power over my life’. [FAS] 5. The Personal and the Political are fused in Rich’s poems. She turns her personal concerns into political issues. ‘I have seen the mob of late Standing sullen in the square … Some have held and fingered stones… not that missiles will be cast’ [TUSITDR]’ ‘the oppressor’s language’ [OWL] ‘Out in this desert we are testing bombs’ [TTTWAM] ‘a book of myths in which our names do no appear’ [DITW] ‘the failures of the race’ [FAS] 6. Language ‘murmurings of missile throwers’ [TUSITDR] ‘the permissible fibs and now a knot of lies… words bitten through words meanings burned off… dead letters… and there are no words for this…’ [OWL]. ‘surrounded by a silence that sounds like the silence of the place except it came with us and is familiar and everything we were saying until now was an effort to blot it out’ [TTTWAM]. ‘the book of myths… and there is no one to tell me… The words are purposes The words are maps… the thing itself and not the myth… the water-eaten log’ [DITW]. 7. Art/Artistic Ambition ‘The tigers in the panel that she made Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid’ [AJT]. ‘these treasures handed down’ [TUSITDR]. ‘She had thought the studio would keep itself… a piano with a Persian shawl… had risen at his urging… that morning light so coldly would delineate the scraps… he with a yawn…’ [LIS]. ‘…to lay— with infinite exertion… All those blueprints… my tools are the wrong ones…’ [TR] ‘I go down… and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin… my mask is powerful… …the deep element… I came to explore the wreck… 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… carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths’ [DITW]. ‘a succession of brief amazing moments’ [FAS]. ‘denying her wounds came from the same source as her power’ [P] • There are other themes that can be amply supported from this selection of poems: denial, struggle, conflict, survival, discovery, and self-realisation. These themes are explored implicitly in the material above and can be generously supported from several of the poems on the course. Style Form In her early poems like AJT, TUSITDR and SW Rich is formal and consciously distanced from her subject matter, though she is trying to come to terms with issues that dominate her later poetic career. The stanzas are measured and regular, often with a rhyming pattern. Her later poetry is more informal, colloquial and less structured. Her stanzas become irregular. In "Trying to Talk with a Man," the first lines seem flatly factual. She uses the staccato or cutting style of cinematic images, for instance in ‘Power’. Often in these less rigidly formal poems her final lines reflect the opening and thus form an impression of overall unity: e.g. TTTWAM and DITW. Speaker A detached independent observer [AJT] and [LIS], first person caricature [TUSITDR], imaginary first person [SW] and the poet herself in the remaining poems. Tone Detachment [AJT], smug and humorous [TUSITDR], mocking [LIS], hushed, reflective and vulnerable [TR], protesting and sympathetic [OWL], confessional, intimate and admonitory [TTTWAM], grand, detached and declamatory [DITW], calm, forgiving and exhilarated [FAS], empathic and admonitory [P]. Language Most of Rich’s poetic lines are expressed in common, accessible language, even in her most profound poems: ‘I came to explore the wreck’ [DITW]. Rich’s language is experimental at times, such as in the poem ‘Power’. The experiment with word spacing and omission of punctuation create an effect like film cuts, allowing the reader or listener to the poem to draw their own thoughts from the material. Note how the positioning of words in lines of varying length gives emphasis to the notion of (artistic) denial and self-sacrifice [P]. In her early poems the language is formal, fitting into regular stanzas of iambic pentameter [AJF] and [SW]. The diction of these early poems is simple, often monosyllabic. One can discern a fairy tale type of lilt in which the words are easy to follow and the meaning is easily attained. They are also catchy. In TTTWAM Rich uses biblical language to turn the setting of the Nevada Desret testing site into something apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic: ‘laceration, thirst.’ Sometimes a clever effect is achieved like ‘words bitten thru’ [OWL], where ‘thru’ is a bitten off word. In many of her poems the language is conversational and intimate: ‘I don’t know who we thought we were’ [FAS] Repetition of opening words at the end of the poem is a frequent feature of Rich’s language use e.g. [DITW]. This generates rhythm. Imagery In TTTWAM a a bomb-testing site is a metaphor for the inner affliction of the speaker; it’s a landscape of consciousness that possesses the physical and moral dangers of an Atomic Bomb testing site in the desert. Rich juxtaposes the imagery of domestic life against the arid ‘condemned scenery’ of a Nevada test site with the ‘underground river/ forcing its way between deformed cliffs’. Rich uses provocative images to imply the fall-out that accompanies a marriage break-up. The dread factor of a nuclear explosion, very much public arena, is compared to the dread factor that accompanies a marriage break-up, very much private arena. In DITW Rich compares a journey through the ocean depths to a journey into mythology and a journey into the past. The journey is a metaphor of the hazardous quest for fundamental knowledge, a quest to find a modern version of the biblical tree of knowledge with Eve transformed into an androgynous mermaid/man. The ‘myth’ is ironically ever-present; despite the poet’s claim that she is discarding it’s patriarchal original. The poem is constructed around an extended metaphor of a sunken treasure ship that’s slowly being altered to a coral reef. A boat wreck is compared to traditional culture and also to the self. Buried treasure is a metaphor for knowledge: ‘silver, copper, vermeil’. Is Rich trying to consign gender to ‘the book of myths’' Many interesting questions regarding the imagery arise from this possibility. The notion of glass, a screen or a mask, suggesting a boundary between the speaker and reality is a recurring motif in some of the course poems. [TUSITDR], [AJT], [SW], [LIS] and [DITW]. The imagery of clear light recurs e.g. [LIS] AND [DITW]. ‘Flank’ recurs [DIW] and [P]. There are many other recurrences for the alert and avid student to note