It’s the birthday of major poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), whose poetry changed considerably throughout her lifetime in both content and style, moving away from “the restrained and formal” to more personal poems in free verse.
Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father was Arnold Rice Rich, the chairman of pathology at The Johns Hopkins Medical School, and her mother was concert pianist Helen Elizabeth Rich. (So, not the very most slouchiest parental figures one could have.) Rich was duly groomed for success. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1951 and her first volume of poems, A Change of World (1951), was chosen by W.H. Auden as part of the Yale Younger Poets series. She married a Harvard professor in 1953, with whom she was to have three sons. Her next volume, The Diamond Cutters, came out in 1955, and her third collection, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), revealed her growing engagement with feminism and issues such as racism and the Vietnam War. Her poetry was becoming very angry and very powerful.
She left her husband in 1970; he killed himself later that year.
Rich received the National Book Award for her 1973 collection, Diving into the Wreck, but insisted on accepting it with fellow poets Alice Walker and Audre Lorde. She went on to win many other awards and honors, but refused to accept the National Medal of Arts in 1997, saying, “I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.”
Rich’s poem “Planetarium” is prefaced with the words, “Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), astronomer, sister of William; and others,” and begins:
A woman in the shape of a monster
a monster in the shape of a woman
the skies are full of them
a woman ‘in the snow
among the Clocks and instruments
or measuring the ground with poles’
in her 98 years to discover
8 comets…
(Read the rest here.)
Rich died from complications of rheumatoid arthritis, survived by Michelle Cliff, her partner of many years, her three sons, two grandchildren, and her sister, writer Cynthia Rich.
Have a better Wednesday than you’re expecting and stay scrupulously honest to the data.
I love Adrienne Rich. When I think of her poetry, I think first of the poems in _Diving Into the Wreck_, the first book of hers I was introduced to, and these days one her earliest published poems captures me: “Stepping Backward.” It’s longish; the first stanza and a half:
“Good-by to you whom I shall see tomorrow,
Next year and when I’m fifty; still good-by.
This is the leave we never really take.
If you were dead or gone to live in China
The event might draw your stature in my mind.
I should be forced to look upon you whole
The way we look upon the things we lose.
We see each other daily and in segments;
Parting might make us meet anew, entire.
You asked me once, and I could give no answer,
How far dare we throw off the daily ruse,
Official treacheries of face and name,
Have out our true identity? I could hazard
An answer now, if you are asking still.
We are a small and lonely human race
Showing no sign of mastering solitude
Out on this stony planet that we farm.
The most that we can do for one another
Is let our blunders and our blind mischances
Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.
We might as well be truthful. …”
Thank you for this – what a powerful poem. “We are a small and lonely human race / Showing no sign of mastering solitude…” Very piercing. I will look up the whole thing.