A poet for our times: Adrienne Rich

My first post of 2015 is also my first of a book of poetry, and I couldn’t have chosen a better one than “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve” by the renowned American poet, social activist and feminist Adrienne Rich. I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve never read any of Rich’s poetry before, and it took my youngest daughter Adrienne to introduce her to me. She is a revelation – her language is exquisite and painful, her anger fierce and authentic, her social conscience omnipresent. As she herself has said of this book of her poems written from 2007-2010, “I believe everything I have come to know, have come to understand, is somewhere in this book.” Rich died in 2012.

In some of these poems, Rich examines the sickness in society—government run by cynics, economy corroded by corporations, Establishment committed to war, absent citizenry. These poems rage, are filled with slashing imagery as in “Ballade of the Poverties”:  There’s the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted toilet bowl the poverty of to steal food for the first time the poverty of to mouth a penis for a paycheck…  Other poems hold a tired yearning for revolution not come in her lifetime, as in “Scenes of Negotiations”: There are no illusions at this table or from “Waiting for Rain, For Music: waiting for tomorrow long after tomorrow should’ve come or from “Benjamin Revisited”:  The angel of history has flown …

There is her own awakening to the poet within her described in “Domain”: The girl finding her method: you want friends you’re going to have to write letters to strangers… And her discovery of the revolutionary within her: Pain taught her the language root of radical. She walked on knives to gain a voice…  And there are her love poems. Having come to recognize her lesbian self late in life, these are bittersweet and lovely, as in “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve”: Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon’s eyelid … later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere…

Her poems are stunning and painful, difficult but penetrating. Also, sometimes beautiful. Rich has written about poetry that it should “remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible.” That is a philosophy I subscribe to as well. I look forward to reading more of her works, including her earlier collections.