Selected poems, 1950-2012

"I saw my mother's menstrual blood before I saw my own. Hers was the first female body I ever looked at, to know what women were, what I was to be," Adrienne Rich writes in "Motherhood and Daughterhood," a 1976 essay. Female identity begins with the body: "I too shall have breasts, full hips, hair between my thighs.... I too shall marry, have children - but not like her. I shall find a way of doing it all differently." Indeed she did, blazing a new path for herself and for other women, but not before doing it the same way, raising three boys in a heterosexual marriage subject to many of the confines "Mad Men" has allowed popular culture to revisit in recent years. Rich came to consciousness as a poet - and person - of the 1950s, 20th-century America's most repressed and repressive decade, a retreat, after the madness of World War II, to traditional values: Women were meant to stay at home, to raise children and to enable their husbands' worldly careers. Rich's early books of poetry narrate an apprenticeship in the status quo, a slow, steady casting off of immeasurably old, unspeakably limiting ideas about what women could do, think and be in relation to men, followed by the rigorous creation of an empowered female identity for the second half of the 20th century. For Rich, this meant a new life sprung from the old, as a lesbian and groundbreaking feminist writer, as a distiller and popularizer of academic feminist theory, and as a poet who would exert a reshaping influence over other writers forever after. The latest sign of Rich's ongoing impact is the publication this fall by W. W. Norton, six years after her death, of a volume of her "Essential Essays," along with a retrospective collection of verse, "Selected Poems: 1950-2012." Paradox is at the heart of the story these two books tell. Along with their mothers' physical traits, women take on their mothers' history; in order to transcend it, women must work "not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us." Yet the tradition remains and has its uses, not least of which in Rich's case was to introduce her to poetry - a conversation across time. Rich's poems are full of warnings against forgetting the past, against pretending one has escaped it, as in a reflection on the life of Marie Curie, who, Rich writes, died "denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power." She urges a profound kind of ambivalence: Proceed with caution, looking over your shoulder, and somehow simultaneously with fierce abandon. AMBIVALENCE AND SUBVERSION are already evident in Rich's debut collection, "A Change of World" (1951), which was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize by W. H. Auden, both the standard-bearer of literary tradition and the discoverer of many poets who would break with it (among them John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin and James Wright). "I cherished a secret grudge against Auden," Rich reflects in one essay, "not because he didn't proclaim me a genius, but because he proclaimed so diminished a scope for poetry, including mine." The early poems are very much of their moment, formally virtuosic and written in the stilted manner (even as they already begin to defy the accepted subject matter) of any number of midcentury poets. "In those years formalism was part of the strategy," Rich recalls: Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool Find even the ivory needle hard to pull. The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand. From Rich's early poems, one simply couldn't have extrapolated the wide horizons she'd reach for just a few years later. The poems of the 1950s and '60s chart a steady course of development. By "Leaflets" (1969), Rich has shed formal stricture in favor of organic, free forms and a grave, speech-inflected tone; these poems of her second period profoundly repudiate the imposition of poetic, political and social traditions: The old masters, the old sources, haven't a clue what we're about, shivering here in the half-dark 'sixties. They point the way toward her greatest poetic work, from "Diving Into the Wreck" (1973) and "The Dream of a Common Language" (1978), poems written alongside her groundbreaking essays. Rich's contemporary Sylvia Plath viewed Rich as a primary rival; Rich's name comes up in tight-lipped passages in Plath's journals, as, for instance, a poet "who will soon be eclipsed." I don't think Rich returned Plath's ferocious competitiveness, but they shared a youthful literary ambition to write their way out of the shackles of midcentury female identity. Rich was far more direct and radical than her peers. Certainly Plath and Anne Sexton claimed a kind of imaginative power that could match, even exceed that of male poets. But Rich, in her seminal poems and essays, took this reimagining as her central subject. She explodes the very idea of gender the way that James Baldwin, in "Notes of a Native Son," did with race. Baldwin was among the literary models, Rich writes, who "helped me to realize that what had seemed simply 'the way things are' could actually be a social construct, advantageous to some people and detrimental to others, and that these constructs could be criticized and changed." Change spurred via criticism (in the literary sense of that word) becomes the object of the essays, which by the 1970s are coming fast and furious, at least as much a part of Rich's literary output as her poems. "This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again," Baldwin wrote, announcing the change his criticism would enact. Similarly, Rich proclaims, with all the urgency of revelation, "No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness," issuing a warning to her fellow outsiders - we can't win if we play their game. It is men who wrote the "book of myths / in which / our names do not appear." These famous closing lines from "Diving Into the Wreck" are Rich's poetic call for a new set of myths; by the '70s, she was avidly writing it. The notion of the outsider is central to Rich's thinking, a key that opens subjects ranging from literature to feminism to politics, which, in both essays and poems, are all effortlessly - and necessarily - interwoven. Rich reframes classic literature through a feminist lens. Of "Jane Eyre," she writes, "The wind that blows through this novel is the wind of sexual equality." In the utterly thrilling "Vesuvius at Home," she gives us a new Emily Dickinson, "a great psychologist" who saw through her patriarchal society and claimed the solitude and independence she needed to make her art. And she looks back at Elizabeth Bishop, already a senior figure in Rich's poetic youth, a closeted lesbian who represented a tradition - "diffuse, elusive, often cryptic" - that Rich was working to escape. Finally, however, Rich comes to find Bishop's poems "remarkably honest and courageous" precisely because she was an outsider and "critically and consciously trying to explore marginality, power and powerlessness, often in poetry of great beauty and sensuousness." This strikes me as perhaps the first utterance of what has become the standard reading of Bishop. Now I need to confess something. Until recently, I mostly ignored Rich. I read "Diving Into the Wreck" in college and have always had a few of her books in my poetry library, but, I'm embarrassed to admit, I didn't credit how important she was. I told myself I didn't like political poetry, that I was already a feminist, so I didn't need to read the essays. I was afraid, I now see, to admit what she worked so fiercely to articulate: that I, as a white man, have always thoughtlessly partaken of all sorts of privilege, that I am an insider in ways I had the luxury of ignoring - in fact, it was specifically the truth of Rich's writing that my privilege insulated me from. I don't mean to claim some instant, magic woke-ness upon reading these books. But Rich offers me a powerful and necessary reminder of the continuous selfreflection required to fight ignorance - one's own and others'. We need to reread these books, especially now. Rather than hide behind madness and a reckless shirking of decorum like Plath and Sexton, Rich made it her mission to expose herself - and her readers - to the facts of patriarchy and racism that had made her, and which are still woven deeply into American identity. Many of these essays could have been written tomorrow. I'll confess one more thing: Reading the prose and poetry side by side has convinced me that it is in the essays that Rich makes her most imperative and lasting statements - but only because the poems, with luminous metaphor and embodiment, lit the way through the historical darkness. Those poetic torches first flared in the 1960s, glowed brightest in the '70s, and began to fade in the '80s, but there is invaluable prose almost to the end of Rich's writing life. It's as if the prose siphoned the light of the poems over time, such that the late poetry retreats into the colder abstraction of this poem from 2007: Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on doing Rich never really suffered the indignity common to poets with long careers: merely self-imitative late poems that strain for effects the poet discovered decades ago. But many of Rich's late poems seem to want to state their politics without grounding them in the life of the body, from which language learns its metaphors. This is a voice edging toward rhetoric, away from poetry, and away from us. Meanwhile, Rich's essays draw ever closer to her own and her readers' conscience. "To be a female human being trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination," Rich writes in "When We Dead Awaken" (1971), claiming for herself and other woman artists the same inner freedom Dickinson showed her how to preserve. In "What Does a Woman Need to Know?," a 1979 commencement address at Smith College, Rich warns young women that a patriarchal society will try to make subservience seem like the woman's own good idea: "Doesn't she need to know how seemingly natural states of being, like heterosexuality, like motherhood, have been enforced and institutionalized to deprive her of power?" And in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," from 1980, she offers an evergreen explanation of how "the destruction of records and memorabilia and letters documenting the realities of lesbian existence" serves as "a means of keeping heterosexuality compulsory for women, since what has been kept from our knowledge is joy, sensuality, courage and community." The Trump era lends a new urgency to all of these insights, not that they were ever less than urgent. These two volumes will be the gateway to Rich's pivotal body of work for the coming generation of readers. They will find a piercingly clear and authoritative voice in both poetry and prose, able to assert itself on seemingly any topic, which will serve as a model for inaugurating and explaining future paradigm shifts. They will find what were once new ideas that are now commonplace, in part thanks to Rich. They will find, in a little more than 800 pages, a summation of one of the great careers in American letters, a profound and beautiful call to think, and feel, and fight. CRAIG MORGAN teicher is the author, most recently, of a collection of essays, "We Begin in Gladness: How Poets Progress." Rich offers a powerful reminder of the continuous self-reflection required to fight ignorance - one's own and others'.