{"id":128069,"date":"2018-08-06T09:00:33","date_gmt":"2018-08-06T13:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=128069"},"modified":"2018-08-06T14:17:58","modified_gmt":"2018-08-06T18:17:58","slug":"the-treasures-that-prevail-on-the-prose-of-adrienne-rich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/08\/06\/the-treasures-that-prevail-on-the-prose-of-adrienne-rich\/","title":{"rendered":"The Treasures That Prevail: On the Prose of Adrienne Rich"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Adrienne Rich.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Toward the end of \u201cDiving into the Wreck,\u201d one of her most renowned poems, Adrienne Rich explains the goals of her underwater journey:<\/p>\n

I came to explore the wreck.
\nThe words are purposes.
\nThe words are maps.
\nI came to see the damage that was done
\nand the treasures that prevail.
\nI stroke the beam of my lamp
\nslowly along the flank
\nof something more permanent
\nthan fish or weed<\/p>\n

the thing I came for:
\nthe wreck and not the story of the wreck
\nthe thing itself and not the myth<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here, she says, is the imperative of investigation: needful research into \u201cthe damage that was done \/ and the treasures that prevail.\u201d Arguably, as she confided that she discovered sometime in the sixties, such research into reality\u2014\u201cthe thing itself and not the myth\u201d\u2014was a major aim of her work as a poet. But perhaps it hasn\u2019t yet been clearly enough understood how crucially her writings in prose complemented, supplemented, enriched, and, yes, inspired her writing in verse. For in these writings she was not just one of many contemporary poets illuminating her verse through confessional glosses but a major memoirist, essayist, theorist, and scholar.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As an undergraduate at Radcliffe, Rich was enthralled by the poems of W.\u2009B. Yeats, from whose lucid cadences she took what she needed to enhance her aesthetic craft. As she confides in \u201cBlood, Bread, and Poetry,\u201d the \u201cdialogue between art and politics \u2026 excited me in his work, along with the sound of his language.\u201d To be sure, there are countless differences between these two writers, in particular large gaps between the Irish artist\u2019s problematic sexual politics and Rich\u2019s radical reimaginings of gender, as well as between Yeats\u2019s eccentric (and aristocratic) mysticism and Rich\u2019s social realism. (She was never, she notes, interested in \u201chis elaborate mythological systems.\u201d) Yet what links the two, at different ends of the twentieth century and of the political spectrum, is a fierce urge toward personal and poetic refashioning, along with an increasingly powerful sense of communal responsibility. For if Yeats spoke for Ireland\u2014once telling an unruly Abbey Theatre audience that \u201cthe author of Countess Cathleen<\/em> speaks to you\u201d\u2014Rich spoke just as passionately for women, and more specifically for lesbians, for black women, for working-class women, for Jews, and, in a larger sense, for the dispossessed, for those whom the poet Anne Winters has called \u201cthe displaced of capital.\u201d<\/p>\n

In time, as she grew into the intense feminism that was to shape both her life and her work, Rich was increasingly drawn\u2014as so many of us were in the sixties and seventies\u2014to female forebears, who took the place of the \u201cmasters\u201d she had studied in college. Like Virginia Woolf, who famously declared that \u201cwe think back through our mothers, if we are women,\u201d she assembled a visionary company of ancestresses whose arts and ideas she meticulously analyzed. Prominent among these was the multifaceted American poet Muriel Rukeyser, whose own ongoing \u201cdialogue between art and politics\u201d became as inspiring to the mature Rich as Yeats had been to the Radcliffe undergraduate. Rukeyser, Rich explains in an essay I\u2019ve included here, \u201cspoke as a poet, first and foremost; but she spoke also as a thinking activist, biographer, traveler, explorer of her country\u2019s psychic geography.\u201d She had first read Rukeyser, Rich notes, in the early fifties, because \u201clike her, I had won the Yale Younger Poets Prize at the age of twenty-one, and I was curious to see what a woman poet, at my age, now ahead of me on the path, had written in her first book.\u201d Although she still remembered \u201cthe extraordinary force of the first poem in Theory of<\/em> Flight<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>how it broke over me, and my envy of the sweeping lines, the authority\u201d in that work, she confessed that she wasn\u2019t yet prepared to learn from Rukeyser. \u201cI came to [her] in my maturity, as my own life opened out [and] I found her to be the poet I most needed in the struggle to make my poems and live my life.\u201d For indeed, like Rukeyser, Rich became \u201ca thinking activist\u201d and\u2014throughout her career but especially in such works as \u201cBlood, Bread, and Poetry\u201d and An Atlas of the Difficult World<\/em>\u2014a sensitive \u201cexplorer of her country\u2019s psychic geography.\u201d<\/p>\n

To reread and rethink Rich\u2019s prose as a complete oeuvre is to encounter a major public intellectual\u2014responsible, self-questioning, and morally passionate. For those of us who came of age during feminism\u2019s fabled second wave in the seventies, texts like \u201cWhen We Dead Awaken\u201d and \u201cCompulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence\u201d were key proclamations of ideas that we desperately needed to guide us on our way. Equally important to us was the powerful blend of research, theory, and self-reflection that she produced in her landmark study Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. <\/em>Later, as we matured into the nineties and the twenty-first century, Rich\u2019s analyses of poetry\u2014her own art and the art of others\u2014as in What Is Found There, <\/em>helped us, especially those of us who were poets and devoted readers of poetry, to sort through a canon that needed reexamination. And throughout her career, the political keenness and candor that energized such writings as \u201cWhy I Refused the National Medal for the Arts\u201d grounded us in a dissent that was both firm and formidable.<\/p>\n

What is perhaps most compelling about Rich\u2019s prose, however, isn\u2019t just its grounding in dissent but its origin in disclosure. Although she herself often claimed that she disliked the \u201cpersonal\u201d or \u201cconfessional,\u201d considering them \u201ctherapeutic\u201d genres that evaded edgier social contexts, her prose writings, even more than her verse, mine a richly autobiographical vein. By the time one has read through some of her strongest essays, one comes to know her ambitious, sometimes tyrannical Jewish father, Arnold Rich, and her genteel Gentile Southern mother, Helen Rich, as if they were figures in Proust. The daughter here is nothing but honest, and her personal interpolations significantly illuminate her political interventions. Neither a confessional writer nor a memoirist\u2014she was always private about the failure of her marriage and about the lives of her children\u2014she nevertheless profiled Baltimore (in the forties) and Cambridge (in the fifties) in such precise detail that we feel present at a kind of documentary.<\/p>\n

Even Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution<\/em>, begun as a research project, offers comparable portraits of what was and how it changed. At the same time, though, it was and is a groundbreaking feminist study that brilliantly exemplifies the innovative scholarship energized by what has come to be called the second wave of the women\u2019s movement. That Rich, never a professional academic or graduate student, was such a leader in this field, working with rigorous lucidity, makes me wish I could leap into a time machine, go back into the past, and remind dissenters\u2014for instance Midge Dector, \u201cthe anti-feminist woman\u201d of one of Rich\u2019s essays\u2014how much thought from how many serious thinkers inspired marches, meetings, and manifestos. In fact, <\/strong>it was the serious and dedicated thought of seventies feminism that not only transformed Rich from a Yeatsian acolyte to a Rukeyser disciple but also motivated her own \u201cwill to change\u201d from a writer of intelligent, casual reviews to an \u201cactivist thinker.\u201d In her eloquent \u201cArts of the Possible,\u201d she recounts that metamorphic time. \u201cThe women\u2019s liberation movement embodied for a while the kind of creative space a liberatory political movement can make possible: \u2018a visionary relation to reality.\u2019 Why this happens has something to do with the sheer power of a collective imagining of change and a sense of collective hope.\u201d Also, of course, it has something\u2014maybe everything\u2014to do with the ways in which liberatory political movements must inevitably find poets and prophets who can articulate their collective hopes. Such a spokesperson was Adrienne Rich, as both her poems and her prose writings reveal.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

One of the first essays that Rich published was a 1963 review of D.\u2009H. Lawrence\u2019s Collected Poems<\/em>\u00a0in Poetry <\/em>magazine. Sophisticated and incisive, the piece clearly reveals the readerly intelligence with which she approached the writings of a poet-novelist whose verse was at that time significantly underappreciated, even while it also demonstrates that she herself was a keen practitioner of her aesthetic craft. Analyzing Lawrence\u2019s poems in the context of his own lyric manifesto, \u201cThe Poetry of the Present,\u201d she dramatizes, even then, her awareness that a poet\u2019s prose writings are also, in a sense, part of her poetic canon. After that, she wrote a few other reviews for Poetry<\/em> and, in the early seventies, briefly became a columnist for The American Poetry Review. <\/em>By the time she reviewed Lawrence\u2019s poems, however, she had already published two collections of her own, A Change of World <\/em>(1951), which won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, and The Diamond Cutters <\/em>(1955)<\/p>\n

Of the first book, W.\u2009H. Auden, then editor for the Yale series, writes in a notoriously patronizing preface that the poems \u201care neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs.\u201d A few years later, in a review of The Diamond Cutters, <\/em>Randall Jarrell thickens the plot, claiming that the author of the book seems \u201cto us a sort of princess in a fairy tale.\u201d But the Adrienne Cecile Rich (for so she signed her first two books) of whom these masterful poets were speaking seems to have been largely a figment of their imaginations. True, her parents had bestowed on her a somewhat flowery name, but along with that, they\u2019d given her an education in aspiration and expertise. Her father was a distinguished pathologist; her mother a former concert pianist. The older of two sisters, Adrienne was the son the couple wanted and never had. Homeschooled until fourth grade, she was taught verse forms along with Bach and Mozart while ranging freely through her father\u2019s extensive library. After that, she went on to an excellent private school for girls and then to Radcliffe, from which she returned after her freshman year \u201cflaming with new insights, new information\u201d as \u201cthe daughter who has gone out into the world, to the pinnacle of intellectual prestige \u2026 fulfilling my father\u2019s hopes for me, but also exposed to dangerous influences.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDangerous influences.\u201d Beneath a veneer of decorum, the stubborn poet had begun to stir. But given her specialized upbringing, she had to rebel on several fronts. In secret, she confides in a letter to a longtime friend, she had as a teenager \u201cspent hours writing imitations of cosmetic advertising and illustrating them copiously,\u201d and \u201cmercifully,\u201d she recalls in print, she \u201cdiscovered Modern Screen, Photoplay,<\/em> Jack Benny, \u2018Your Hit Parade,\u2019 Frank Sinatra,\u201d and other icons of popular culture. Worse still, though from her father\u2019s perspective she was \u201csatisfyingly precocious,\u201d she had \u201cearly been given to tics and tantrums.\u201d Even in the years when Auden and Jarrell were captivated by what they saw as her dutiful command of versification (\u201cI was exceptionally well grounded in formal technique,\u201d she herself admits, \u201cand I loved the craft\u201d), she was \u201cgroping for \u2026 something larger.\u201d Her first act of overt rebellion against a father whom she once defined as \u201cPapa Bronte\u201d was to marry \u201ca divorced graduate student\u201d from an observant Eastern European Jewish family, a background that Arnold Rich, a secular (and atheistic) Jew disliked. Her parents refused to attend the wedding, which was held at Hillel House in Cambridge.<\/p>\n

After that, as she recalled, she began to write what her father defined as \u201c\u2009\u2018modern,\u2019 \u2018obscure,\u2019 \u2018pessimistic\u2019 poetry,\u201d and eventually, she had \u201cthe final temerity to get pregnant.\u201d Another young woman poet who visited Cambridge at this time discerned what Auden, Jarrell, and Arnold Rich had failed to grasp. Sylvia Plath was fiercely rivalrous toward Rich but describes her, with some respect, as \u201call vibrant short black hair, great sparkling black eyes and a tulip-red umbrella; honest, pink, forthright and even opinionated.\u201d But at the same time, curiously enough, in rebelling against her father\u2019s plans for her intellectual career, Rich had entrapped herself in what Betty Friedan has called the \u201cfeminine mystique\u201d of the fifties. She gave birth to three sons before she was thirty, and as Of Woman Born<\/em> testifies, her experience of motherhood as a social and cultural institution was utterly life changing. \u201cMotherhood radicalized me,\u201d she declared, for both the experience and the institution had forced her to attend to the powerful gender distinctions that shape and sometimes shatter women\u2019s worlds.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnger and tenderness,\u201d the phrase with which Rich titles the first chapter of that book, marked her career during the nearly two decades of her marriage, when she and her husband, Alfred Conrad, a Harvard professor of economics, were bringing up their boys, both in Cambridge and New York. And for much of this time, Rich was relatively silent as a poet: there\u2019s a gap of nearly a decade between her publication of The Diamond Cutters<\/em> and her next groundbreaking, protofeminist book,\u00a0Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law <\/em>(1963), though for the rest of her career, she published nearly a collection a year.<\/p>\n

During the tumultuous sixties, Rich\u2019s marriage to Conrad began to disintegrate, as the couple moved to New York and Rich herself turned increasingly to the thinking activism that reshaped her art and thought. In 1970, in the midst of personal and political turmoil, Conrad drove to Vermont near where the family had a country house and took his own life with a gunshot. Shocked, Rich went on to become, as she calls herself in one poem, \u201ca survivor.\u201d A few years after her husband\u2019s death, she ruefully describes its aftermath:<\/p>\n

Next year it would have been 20 years
\nand you are wastefully dead
\nwho might have made the leap
\nwe talked, too late, of making<\/p>\n

which I live now
\nnot as a leap
\nbut a succession of brief, amazing movements<\/p>\n

each one making possible the next.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

By the seventies, in one of those amazing movements, she had committed herself to a \u201clesbian existence\u201d that she defines as \u201cwomanly, powerful.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 1976, Rich began her lifelong partnership with the Jamaican-born novelist and poet Michelle Cliff, and her major essay \u201cCompulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence\u201d appeared in 1980. Then, in \u201cSplit at the Root\u201d (1982) and the long poem \u201cSources\u201d (1982), she began to reclaim her Jewish heritage. In 1983, she went to Nicaragua to try to understand the Sandinistas and, further, \u201cto get a sense of what art might mean in a society committed to values other than profit and consumerism.\u201d By the time she published her ambitious, Whitmanesque \u201cAtlas of the Difficult World\u201d (1991), she was \u201cbent on fathoming what it means to love my country,\u201d affirming that a \u201cpatriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country \/ as she wrestles for her own being.\u201d One amazing movement after another had brought her to the center of public discourse, where she wrote of blood, bread, and poetry in an effort to critique racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, heterosexism, consumerism, and class privilege with anger and tenderness. These wellsprings of art, along with the craft to shape them into powerful language, were arguably the treasures that prevailed after she had investigated the wreck of her marriage and the culture that had deformed it.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\u201cI first started writing prose about poetry,\u201d Rich explained to an interviewer in 1991, noting that after the reviews she did for Poetry, <\/em>she had been asked to write a foreword to an edition of Anne Bradstreet\u2019s work. Still, she said, \u201cI didn\u2019t think of myself as an essayist, and I didn\u2019t pursue writing prose on my own, except in my journals.\u201d Here she might have added that she was also a prolific letter writer, whose lively and witty correspondence continued throughout her life and from which a selection may soon, one hopes, appear in print. The practice of prose\u2014in letters and journals\u2014was thus an integral part of her relationship to language. From a professional perspective, however, she speculated \u201cthat it was finally involvement in politics that got me writing prose more, as a part of life, as a regular part of my writing. And very often it was because somebody asked me to speak or asked for an essay.\u201d Nonetheless, she continued, though her prose \u201chas always been initiated from an exterior point, it wasn\u2019t an exterior point that was irrelevant to what was happening to me, in my life, or even in my poetry. I was writing poems out of a lot of the same things which I discussed in the essay \u2018When We Dead Awaken,\u2019 and I have a poem with the same title. Certainly a lot of my other essays have points of intersection with poems, probably none so much as \u2018Split at the Root\u2019 with \u2018Sources\u2019\u2014which I was writing at about the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Interestingly, some of the strongest prose from this period is precisely the kind of \u201cre-visionary\u201d literary criticism that Rich\u2019s manifesto inspired from other feminist thinkers in the seventies, notably her brilliant essays on Jane Eyre<\/em> and Emily Dickinson, which many of us still remember reading with wonder when they first came out. Even literary essays\u2014a review of Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s Collected Poems,<\/em> an introduction to Muriel Rukeyser\u2019s writings, and excerpts from What Is Found There<\/em>\u2014remind us that for Rich, as for so many feminists of her generation and later ones (including my own), the personal, the poetical, and the political were one. At the same time, her extraordinary critical expertise and wide-ranging aesthetic knowledge should also remind us that, as she understatedly puts it, she was \u201cexceptionally well grounded in formal technique\u201d and truly loved her craft.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sandra\u00a0M.\u00a0Gilbert\u00a0is the editor of Adrienne Rich\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0Essential Essays. A resident of Berkeley, California, she has published eight collections of poetry and has a new volume,<\/em>\u00a0Judgment Day, forthcoming. Among her prose books are<\/em>\u00a0Wrongful Death,\u00a0Death\u2019s Door, Rereading Women, and\u00a0<\/em>The Culinary Imagination. With Susan Gubar, she has coauthored<\/em>\u00a0The Madwoman in the Attic,\u00a0No Man\u2019s Land\u00a0(three volumes), and a number of other books. The two are currently at work on a study\u00a0tentatively titled <\/em>Still Mad: Seventies Feminism Today.<\/em><\/p>\n

Excerpted from<\/em>\u00a0Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry,<\/em>\u00a0by Adrienne Rich, edited and with an introduction by\u00a0Sandra\u00a0M.\u00a0Gilbert. Copyright \u00a9 2018 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Introduction copyright \u00a9 2018 by\u00a0Sandra\u00a0M.\u00a0Gilbert. Used with permission of the publisher, W.\u2009W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Toward the end of \u201cDiving into the Wreck,\u201d one of her most renowned poems, Adrienne Rich explains the goals of her underwater journey: I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1561,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[1628,34884,34886,34882,34881,1102,11044,34885,34883,8928,34887],"class_list":["post-128069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-adrienne-rich","tag-an-atlas-of-the-difficult-world","tag-compulsory-heterosexuality","tag-countess-cathleen","tag-diving-into-the-wreck","tag-feminism","tag-muriel-rukeyser","tag-of-woman-born-motherhood-as-experience-and-institution","tag-theory-of-flight","tag-w-b-yeats","tag-what-is-found-there"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Treasures That Prevail: On the Prose of Adrienne Rich by Sandra M. 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