What Adrienne Rich Wrote

My whole heart aches at the news of her death, this great poet, fierce essayist, loving activist, this woman I never met but who reverberated in my mind and body. I feel shaken. I may have more to say about her and her life's work. But for now, let me back off. Let Adrienne Rich speak for herself.

I know that "capitalism" is an unfashionable word. "Democracy," "free enterprise," "market economy" are the banners now floating above our economic system. Still, as a poet, I choose to sieve up old sunken words, heave them, dripping with silt, turn them over, and bring them into the air of the present. Where every public decision has to be justified in the scales of corporate profits, poetry unsettles these apparently self-evident propositions -- not through ideology, but by its very presence and ways of beings, its embodiment of states of longing and desire.

[...]

You will remember the pictorial names (of birds) as you won't the Latin, which, however, is more specific as to genus and species. Human eyes gazed at each of all these forms of life and saw resemblance in difference--the core of metaphor, that which lies close to the core of poetry itself, the only hope for a humane civil life. The eye for likeness in the midst of contrast, the appeal to recognition, the association of thing to thing, spiritual fact with embodied form, begins here. And so begins the suggestion of multiple, many-layered, rather than singular meanings, wherever we look, in the ordinary world.

[...]

Why do poets ever fawn or clown or archly undercut their work when reading before audiences, as if embarrassed by their own claims to be heard, by poetry's function as witness? Why do some adopt a self-conscious shamanism, as if the electrical thread from human being through poem to other human beings weren't enough? Why are literary journals full of poems that sound as if written by committee in a department of comparative literature, or by people still rehearsing Ezra Pound's long-ago groan  I cannot make it cohere -- a groan that, after so many repetitions, becomes a whine? Why do so many poems full of liberal or radical hope and outrage fail to lift off the ground, for which "politics" is blamed rather than a failure of poetic nerve? Why have poets in the United States (I include myself) so often accepted that so little was being asked of us? asked so little of each other and ourselves?

 

From What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, updated edition. I've told you before how much I love this book.

 

Image Credit: Metro Weekly

Comments

[Sophie]

Hello please can you tell me what page of the book you are quoting from?
Thanks