{"id":11240,"date":"2011-03-02T10:14:44","date_gmt":"2011-03-02T15:14:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=11240"},"modified":"2011-03-02T11:30:42","modified_gmt":"2011-03-02T16:30:42","slug":"adrienne-rich-on-%e2%80%98tonight-no-poetry-will-serve%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/03\/02\/adrienne-rich-on-%e2%80%98tonight-no-poetry-will-serve%e2%80%99\/","title":{"rendered":"Adrienne Rich on \u2018Tonight No Poetry Will Serve\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Photograph by Robert Giard. <\/p><\/div>\n

Adrienne Rich needs no introduction. One of the twentieth century\u2019s most exhaustively celebrated poets and essayists, she counts among her many honors a National Book Award, a Book Critics Circle Award, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Robert Hass has ascribed to her work the qualities of salt and darkness, praising its \u201crelentless need to confront difficulty.\u201d But Rich\u2019s latest collection, <\/em>Tonight No Poetry Will Serve<\/a>, ranges from dismay to joy, the outraged to the erotic. Over e-mail, Rich shared her thoughts on poetry and power, the search for a more nuanced wartime aesthetic, and the meaning of the \u201cwoman citizen.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with the title, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve<\/em>. <\/strong><\/p>\n

The book has an epigraph from Webster\u2019s Dictionary<\/em>: definitions of the verb \u201cto serve.\u201d It\u2019s an interesting range of meanings, from the idea of obedient servitude to the authoritative (from law, the military, a prison sentence), to the meeting of another\u2019s needs, to being of use. The title poem begins with an erotic moment registered in a world of torture and violence. It turns, midway, from the sensual and \u201cpoetic\u201d to an official grammar, parsing violent policies as you might diagram a sentence in a classroom.<\/p>\n

The poem was inflected, you could say, by interviews I was hearing on Amy Goodman\u2019s program, Democracy Now!<\/em>\u2014about Guant\u00e1namo, waterboarding, official U.S. denials of torture, the \u201crenditioning\u201d of presumed terrorists to countries where they would inevitably be tortured. The line \u201cTonight I think no poetry will serve\u201d suggests that no poetry can serve to mitigate such acts, they nullify language itself. One begins to write of the sensual body, but other bodies \u201celsewhere\u201d are terribly present.<\/p>\n

Do you see the poems in this book as being different from your earlier work? Where are the continuities, the ruptures?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t see this book, really, in that way. My writing\u2014and thinking\u2014has been charting its way over many decades, formed in many ways. My third book, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law<\/em> (1963) was, certainly, a break from previous work in its move from older prescriptive formats (as distinct, by the way, from actual form). That was in my early thirties.<\/p>\n

As long as I can remember I have cared about the timbre, the phrasing of a poetic line. Ever since Snapshots<\/em>, I\u2019ve worked close to the pull and release of voices. Sometimes they\u2019re conversational, sometimes they\u2019re more like the dialogues or choruses of Greek tragedy, addressing conditions of urgency in a communal order or disorder. The voices may be individual, but they\u2019re searching for a shared moral reality.<\/p>\n

The music, the sound of words working together, has always mattered to me. But it\u2019s not necessarily easy listening. It can be fractured, dissonant music, in the sense of Charles Mingus or Mahler\u2019s \u201cDas Lied von der Erde.\u201d The poem \u201cReading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time\u201d opens with the words, \u201cLurid, garish, gash.\u201d I want the sense of physicality, flesh and blood, body language. I want the words to act physically on the reader or hearer.<\/p>\n

Our ears, like it or not, take in so much in a day. Maybe some North American ears have trouble with poetry because of the noise from an aggressively voiced ruling ethos\u2014its terminology of war, success, national security, winning and losing, ownership, merchandising, canned information, canned laughter. Poetry can be direct, it can be colloquial, it can be abrupt or angry, but it\u2019s not that vacuous noise; it wants to unseat that kind of language, play other kinds of sound tracks.<\/p>\n

Going back to the question: I can see, in my eighties, that my work has been a search for the means\u2014the instruments\u2014to make art from insistent concerns and desires that I couldn\u2019t necessarily reach for in any other way. I wanted an awareness of the world as history, to put it largely\u2014as made by human needs and minds and labors\u2014and affections (and also by human cruelty and avariciousness). I started out in the early days of the cold war. As young people, we were indoctrinated with the fear of communism and the atom bomb\u2014which, of course, our own government had already used. The first poem in my first book (\u201cStorm Warnings\u201d in A Change of World <\/em>[1951]) reflects that anxiety\u2014anxiety and sense of powerlessness. Relations of power, as I began to decipher them, have infused a great deal of my work over time\u2014both poetry and prose. But poetry was where I could confront, perhaps transform, what I was experiencing and learning about the world.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a poem from the mid-1950s in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law<\/em>, \u201cFrom Morning Glory to Petersburg\u201d\u2014titles from an encyclopedia volume\u2014that suggests the effort to ask, as a conscious strategy, how do you make livable meaning out of separate bits of classified information? How to live with \u201cfacts\u201d you can\u2019t integrate? Well, one way was to integrate them is through poetry.<\/p>\n

This collection seems more overtly political than some of your previous work. At the same time, it is deeply personal, especially when it explores the costs of speech and the creative act for the poet. Do the personal and the political go together for you? Have they always?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not quite sure why you see Tonight No Poetry Will Serve<\/em> as more overtly political than my other books. The split in our language between \u201cpolitical\u201d and \u201cpersonal\u201d has, I think, been a trap. When I was younger I was undoubtedly caught in that trap\u2014like many women, many poets\u2014as a mode of conceiving experience.<\/p>\n

In 1969 I wrote, \u201cThe moment when a feeling enters the body\/ is political. This touch is political\u201d (\u201cThe Blue Ghazals,\u201d in The Will to Change<\/em> [1971]). Writing that line was a moment of discovering what I\u2019d already begun doing. Much of my earlier poetry had been moving in that direction, though I couldn\u2019t see it or say it so directly.<\/p>\n

In \u201cWaiting for Rain, for Music\u201d there are the lines \u201cStraphanger swaying in a runaway car\/ palming a notebook scribbled\/\/in contraband calligraphy against the war\/ poetry wages against itself.\u201d What is this war?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was imagining someone in a subway car, trying perhaps to write a poem \u201cagainst war\u201d as so many of us have done during and since the Vietnam era (and, historically, way back). But to be \u201cagainst war\u201d has come to seem too easy a stance. War exists in a texture of possession and deprivation, economic and religious dogmas, racism, colonialist exploitation, nationalism, unequal power. Who decides to make war? Who is destroyed in it? Who creates the rhetoric of \u201cterror\u201d and \u201cdemocracy\u201d? And so this poet in the subway has to write \u201cin contraband calligraphy\u201d against a poetry that makes \u201cpeace\u201d seem all too easy or comfortable, war too morally simple. Poetry without a critical social vision, if you will.<\/p>\n

What are the obligations of poetry? Have they changed in your lifetime?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know that poetry itself has any universal or unique obligations. It\u2019s a great ongoing human activity of making, over different times, under different circumstances. For a poet, in this time we call \u201cours,\u201d in this whirlpool of disinformation and manufactured distraction? Not to fake it, not to practice a false innocence, not pull the shades down on what\u2019s happening next door or across town. Not to settle for shallow formulas or lazy nihilism or stifling self-reference.<\/p>\n

Nothing \u201cobliges\u201d us to behave as honorable human beings except each others\u2019 possible examples of honesty and generosity and courage and lucidity, suggesting a greater social compact.<\/p>\n

Could you talk a bit about \u201cAxel Av\u00e1kar?\u201d At times he seems like the self you\u2019ve created to access your imagination as well as the deeper truths that get into poetry. Why is mutual betrayal so important in the \u201cAxel\u201d poems?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Interesting. I didn\u2019t start out with an idea\u2014I never do. The poem began with a dream in which I was reading down a long scroll-like poem signed \u201cAxel Av\u00e1kar.\u201d That was \u201cgiven\u201d; I then began the real work on the poem. I don\u2019t know where the name Axel Av\u00e1kar came from.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think \u201cmutual betrayal\u201d is the subtext\u2014rather, two figures, once somehow intimately connected, now separated, one addressing the other, meeting silence or a recorded message. There are missed dialogues, lost opportunities, danger, the question of who can rescue whom. It\u2019s a densely layered scenario; I hope it resists reduction. I wanted a very visual, vocal sequence of places, emotions, situations. If it has a predecessor in my work, it might be \u201cThe Demon Lover\u201d in Leaflets<\/em> (1969).<\/p>\n

Did you conceive of any of the poems in Tonight No Poetry Will Serve <\/em>as direct replies to previous poems? For instance, I wondered about \u201cYou, Again\u201d and \u201cDiving into the Wreck.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, no. But \u201cYou, Again\u201d has a kind of geneaology of its own. \u201cYou\u201d is a personified city\u2014New York as I knew and lived it in the sixties and seventies. I\u2019ve written a lot of poems from and of that place. I suppose \u201cYou, Again\u201d has to do with a recurrent longing for return and restoration. But the city today is vastly changed from what it was between 1966 and 1978. It\u2019s owned now by wealth and tourism.<\/p>\n

I just reread James Baldwin\u2019s novel, Another Country<\/em>\u2014a great New York novel set in the fifties. Baldwin sees the possibilities offered, the cruel defeats inflicted, the social and racial transgressions that sometimes make for survival. I recognize that city. And that\u2019s not nostalgia.<\/p>\n

You write in \u201cPowers of Recuperation,\u201d \u201cAll new learning looks at first like chaos.\u201d Are you hopeful about the future?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, that poem begins, \u201cA woman of the citizens\u2019 party\u201d and immediately a voice interrupts: \u201cWhat\u2019s that?\u201d Implied is a forgotten history of radical citizenship, resistance, a \u201cparty\u201d still existing but now banished, clandestine. Its former or future leaders are to be found living under bridges, communicating in codes, preparing another phase of history, a new learning. That woman might be a leader or a message-bearer, one of those who haven\u2019t given up, who move organically with what\u2019s required by new situations, seeming chaos.<\/p>\n

The image at the end of the poem is from D\u00fcrer\u2019s famous engraving, Melencolia I<\/em>. It shows a woman, powerful in face and body, introspective, seated among various instruments of science and artisanship. She seems to be imagining\u2014we don\u2019t know what. Melencolia I<\/em> refers to an old idea of the melancholy of the imaginative spirit\u2014not sadness but a profound study of the world. I\u2019ve had that engraving on my wall since I was in my teens.<\/p>\n

So walking through the desolation of a built city, the woman citizen encounters a figurative planner of the \u201cunbuilt place.\u201d My hope is that these metaphorical creations don\u2019t stay metaphorical for too long.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Adrienne Rich needs no introduction. One of the twentieth century\u2019s most exhaustively celebrated poets and essayists, she counts among her many honors a National Book Award, a Book Critics Circle Award, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. Robert Hass has ascribed to her work the qualities of salt and darkness, praising its \u201crelentless need to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":78,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[1628,1447,165,1924],"class_list":["post-11240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-adrienne-rich","tag-poet","tag-poetry","tag-tonight-no-poetry-will-serve"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nAdrienne Rich on \u2018Tonight No Poetry Will Serve\u2019 by Kate Waldman<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 2, 2011 \u2013 Adrienne Rich needs no introduction. 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