On Reading Adrienne Rich - No Regrets Fall 2018

No Regrets Journal On Reading Adrienne Rich

Fall 2018 Issue 23


No Regrets, a journal of poetry, prose and images about the exploration of being and meaning.

Clayton Medeiros, Editor, Poet, Photographer claymedeiros@aol.com Neil McKay (Johnny Trash), Webmaster Submissions are by invitation of the editor Epublishing http://issuu.com/claymedeiros/docs Facebook page No Regrets Journal, haikus poems and photographs https://www.facebook.com/NoRegretsJournal 




Haiku From Reading Adrienne Rich

multi-foliate dressed in primary colors love comes suddenly

broken mirror shards reflect scattered gibbous moons across the tiled floor 




the back road heads north a rise then the biting wind red barns battened down 




cloudless chilled blue sky gardens gleaned just before frost potted plants invited in 




bell clear darkness falls leaves wither in the bright frost next spring’s loam 




the winds are rising frost dances in the low clouds dun fields are quiet 




across barren fields wind herds hurtling painted leaves ancient arabesques 

Reading Adrienne Rich’s Poetry Adrienne Rich endlessly argued with herself through the generation of poetry, essays, speeches and life itself. She tested boundaries of her own making. She tested the boundaries of the society, groups, organizations and relationships of which she was a part. In publishing her essays, she would point out the difference between what she said then and how it should be changed to reflect what she had learned since then. She was equally open to new information that might further influence her understanding. She was transparent and intensively self reflective. Her poem Incipience captures her self reflection “…I write out my life/hour by hour, word by word”.

From “Permeable Membrane”, “I’ve wanted to write subjective visions of objective conditions….I need to reach beyond interior decoration, biography. Art is a way of melting out through one’s own skin. ‘What, who is the about?’ is not the essential question. A poem is not about; its is out of and to. Passionate language in movement. The deep structure is always musical and physical—as breath as pulse.”

The introduction to “Adrienne Rich 1950-2012 Selected Poems” captures her sensibility in relation to politics, but it also provides a mirror to all that she did, “…she knew that for effective change politics must be grounded and tested in the lived time of personal experience. Indeed, what makes her voice unmistakable is the fact that the public voice is inseparable from the private voice.” At the same time she was very private and refused to cooperate with biographers. She asked her friends and colleagues to do the same. Her letter are embargoed until 2050.

Her poetry does not include references to her three children. She considered her poetry to be separate from being their mother. There are some rare poems that refer to her adult relatives including her father and in laws. After 1976, she did write love poems that celebrated her deeply felt, lifelong relationship with Michelle Cliff, the novelist. She also wrote some late poems about her husband who committed suicide in 1970.

The following excerpts are my selections from some of the poems in this collection.

“Living in Sin” describes a studio and begins with.

“She had thought the studio would keep itself; no dust upon the furniture of love.

Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal, the panes relieved of grime…”

It ends with: “By evening she was back in love again, though not so wholly but throughout the night she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming like a relentless milkman up the stairs.”

“Snapshots Of A Daughter-In-Law”, Section 9 describes the limits placed on being a woman in academia.

“Sigh no more, ladies.

Time is male and in his cups drinks to the fair.

Bemused by gallantry, we hear our mediocrities over-praised indolence read as abnegation slattern thought styled intuition, even lapse forgiven, our crime only to cast too bold a shadow or smash the mould straight off.”

In keeping with the last two lines, she created her own path to and through poetry and prose.

“After Dark” reflects her father’s influence and death.

“Now unasked, you give ground.

We only want to stifle what’s stifling us already.

Alive now, root to crown, I’d give —oh,—something not to know our struggles now are ended.

I seem to hold you, cupped in my hands disappearing.

When your memory fails— no more to scourge my inconsistencies— the sashcords fo the world fly loose a window crashes suddenly down. I go to the woodbox and take a stick of kindling to prop the sash again.

I grow protective toward the world.”

“Trying To Talk With A Man” expresses the frustration of communications between men and women.

“You mention the danger and list the equipment …. but you look at me like an emergency Your dry heat feels like power your eyes are stars of a different magnitude they reflect light that spell out EXIT when you get up and pace the floor talking of the danger as if it were not ourselves as if we were testing something else.”

“Diving Into The Wreck” “This is the place.

And I am her, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body We circled silently about the wreck we dive into the hold.

I am she: I am he …. a book of myths in which our names do not appear.”

“The Phenomenology Of Anger” “ The only real love I have ever felt was for children and other women.

Everything else was lust, pity, self hatred, pity, lust.

This is a woman’s confession.

Now, look again at the face of Botticelli’s Venus, Kali, the Judith of Chartres with her so called smile.”

The Northeast Kingdom. a poor rural area in Vermont where she had a cabin, is well captured in “From An Old House In America”. “the snout of the vacuum cleaner sucks the past away Other lives were lived here: mostly un-articulate yet someone left her creamy signature in the trail of rusticated narcissus straggling up through meadow grass and vetch families breathed close boxed in from the cold hard times, short growing season the old rainwater cistern hulks in the cellar” “Twenty One Love Poems” speak best for themselves.

“No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.” “and I want to show her one poem which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate, and wake. You’ve kissed my hair to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem, I say, a poem I wanted to show someone… and I laugh and fall dreaming again of the desire to show you to everyone I love, to move openly together.”

“Sleeping, turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep:”

Celebrating Vermont and being in love in “Transcendental Etude”.

“I’ve sat on a stone fence above a great, soft, sloping field of musing heifers, a farmstead slanting its planes calmly in the calm light, a dead elm raising bleached arms above a green so dense with life, minute, momentary life—slugs, moles, pheasants, gnats, spiders, moths hummingbirds, groundhogs, butterflies— a lifetime is too narrow to understand it all, beginning with the huge rock shelves that underlie all that life.”

“Sources”, a deep view into the natural world, into a sense of being.

“Shapes of things: so much the same they feel like eternal forms: the house and barn on the rise above May Pond; the brow of Pisgah; the face of milled blooming, brookwater pleating over slanted granite, boletus under pine, the half composted needles it broke through patterned on its skin.

Shape of queen anne’s lace, with the drop of blood.

Bladder campion veined with purple.

Multifoliate heal all.

II I refuse to become a seeker of cures Everything that has ever helped me has come through what already lay stored in me. Old things, diffuse, unmanned, lie strong across my heart.….

With whom do you believe your lot is cast?

From where does your strength come?

I think somehow, somewhere every poem of mine must repeat those questions which are not the same. There is a whom, a where that is not chosen that is given and sometimes falsely given in the beginning we grasp whatever we can to survive”

“Dreams Before Waking” posits the need for change and responsibility.

What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?— You yourself must change it.— what would feel like to know your country was changing?— You yourself must change it.— Though your life felt arduous new and unmapped and staged what would it mean to stand on the first page of the end of despair?”

“An Atlas Of The Difficult World”, continuity in a new geography.

I Within two miles of the Pacific rounding this long bay, sheening the light for miles inland floating its fog through red wood rifts and over strawberry and artichoke fields, its bottomless minds ….

—this is where I live now. If you had known me once, you’d still know me now though in a different light and life. This is no place you ever knew me But it would not surprise you to find me here, walking in fog, the sweep fo the great ocean eluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as always I fix on the land. I am stuck to earth….

These are not the roads you knew me by. But the woman driving, walking, watching for life and death, is the same.

Camino Real, the power and possibility of love and happiness.

“George Oppen to June Degnan: ‘I don’t know how to measure happiness’ —-Why measure? in itself it’s the measure— at the end of a day of great happiness if there be such a day drawn by love’s unprovable pull I write this, sign it Adrienne”

Archaic “you arrived starving at midnight I gave you warmed up food poured tumblers of brandy put Les Barricades Mysterieuses —the only jazz in the house We talked for hours of barricades lesser and greater sorrows ended up laughing in the thick silver bird struck light”

Reading Adrienne Rich’s Essays In the Introduction of her book of essays, Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Selected Prose 1966-1978, she says, “I disagree with myself in this book, and I find in myself both severe and tender feelings toward the women I have been whose thoughts I find here….I have not published here anything I do not think is still to some degree usable: that is part of the effort to define a female consciousness which is political, aesthetic, and erotic, and which refuses to be included or contained in the culture of passivity.”

She exposed the power of patriarchy in academia and the society at large. She opposed unregulated capitalism in no uncertain terms. She was committed to building a world in which women and everyone else would be free to lead their lives.

In her essay from 1975, “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson”, she portrayed herself and her own experience in addition to celebrating Emily Dickinson who had been locked in a dreary box created by the mid Twentieth Century patriarchal, misogynistic and dismissive literary hierarchy.

“The poet’s relationship to her poetry has, it seems to me—and I am not speaking only of Emily Dickinson—a two fold nature. Poetic language —the poem on paper—is a concretization of the poetry of the world at large, the self and the forces within the self; and those forces are rescued from formlessness, lucidiified, and integrated in the act of writing poems.

But there is a more ancient concept of the poet, which is that she is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who—for whatever reasons—are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use behind her own survival.”

This from the 1945 edition of Emily Dickinson’s poems titled Bolts of Melody which Adrienne Rich read when she was 16 and carried for the rest of her life.

I would not paint—a picture— I’d rather be the One Its bright impossibility To dwell—delicious—on— And wonder how the fingers feel Whose rare—celestial —stir Evokes so sweet a Torment— Such sumptuous—Despair— I would not talk, like comets— I’d rather be the One Raised softly to the Ceilings— And out, and easy on— Through villages of Ether Myself endured BalloBy but a slip of Metal The pier to my Pontoon Nor would I be a Poet— It’s finer—own the Ear— Enamored—impotent—content The License to revere, A privilege so awful What would the Dower be, Had I the Art to stun myself With Bolts of Melody!

“The strange paradox of this poem—its exquisite irony—is that it is about choosing not to be a poet, a poem which is gainsaid by no fewer than one thousand seven hundred and seventy five poems made during the writer’s life including itself….but the climax happens as she describes not what it is to be the receiver, but the maker and receiver at once….and of course in writing (the last three lines) she possesses herself fo that privilege and that Dower.”

Patriarchy And Misogyny Adrienne Rich provides insights about patriarchy and misogyny through her essays and poetry. Patriarchy has been at the heart of western culture with its roots in Athenian Greece, the Roman Empire and the founding of the Christian religion. The structure of the church was modeled on the Roman Empire and continued to limit the roles of women.

Patriarchy is found in the Odyssey when Penelope, Odysseus wife, comes down from her private quarter to where the suitors are being entertained by a singer sharing the difficulties the Greek heroes are having coming home.

She asks him to choose a happier song. Her son, Telemachus speaks to her, “Mother, go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff…speech will be the business of men, all men, and me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.”

Penelope dutifully goes upstairs. Aristotle would agree with Telemachus.

Women did not have the right to public participation and dialogue in their own homes or in the public square.

Patriarchy and misogyny infuse the languages of western civilization in their descent from the societies created by Greece and Rome. With rare exception, the documents—literature, philosophy, science, history and essays were written by men. When translation was required from Greek to Latin, it was done by men. Subsequently translations and selections of texts that resulted in the Christian Bible were undertaken by men.

The celibate Saint Paul made the position of the Church clear in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 King James Version, “34 Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law.

35 And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.”

The roles of all women and the roles of mothers specifically were constrained in these cultures and still are in our current society as right wing evangelical christians abandon the underlying empathy of Jesus to collaborate with Republicans, who have lost their moral compass, to limit the reproductive and other rights of all women. In her essay, “Anger and Tenderness”, Adrienne Rich makes the case for the invisibility of

motherhood, and the power of patriarchy. “Motherhood—unmentioned in the histories of conquest and serfdom, wars and treaties, exploration and imperialism—has a history, it has an ideology, it is more fundamental than tribalism or nationalism ….whatever our class or color, the regulation of women’s reproductive power by men in every totalitarian system and every socialist revolution, the legal and technical control by men of contraception, fertility, abortion, obstetrics, gynecology, and extrauterine reproductive experiments—all are essential to the patriarchal system, as is the negative or suspect status of women who are not mothers.”

She adds to this mix in “Motherhood and Daughterhood” some advice that mother’s need to provide their daughters,”’You can be anything you really want to be’ is a half truth, whatever a woman’s class or economic advantages….’You can be anything you really want to be ‘—if you are prepared to fight, to create priorities for yourself against the grain of cultural expectations, to persist in the face of misogynist hostility.”

In “Split at the Root”, she makes the case for the need to articulate one’s position without waiting for perfection whether it be in voice, prose or poetry. The creative act itself has value and can offer insight, ”Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middleclass, feminist, exmatriate southerner, split at the root—that I will never bring them whole….we can’t wait to speak until we are perfectly clear and righteous. There is no purity and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process.”