Adrienne Rich as Bard

This past week and more I have been reading through what I have of Adrienne Rich's poems and essays, reading some things again, reading some things for the first time. At one point I was talked into getting rid of all my Rich books, and convinced that as a political poet she wasn’t any good. That was wrong, and I’ve changed my mind. I now value her poetry highly, and some of her prose essays are fundamental to 20th C. thought about LGBT issues, about poetry, about how to live in a war-torn century and refuse to be complicit with its compromises and losses in public life.

In fact, I like Rich’s anger now more than ever, her rock-hard determination, her use of language to get at the roots of life, partly because they reflect my own, but also because they have come to seem necessary. Too much ground has been given in to the bullies, and that must stop. Her refusal to give in to those who would destroy her, and me, is more essential than ever.

The freedom of the wholly mad
to smear & play with her madness
write with her fingers dipped in it
the length of a room

which is not, of course, the freedom
you have, walking on Broadway
to stop & turn back or go on
10 blocks; 20 blocks

but feels enviable maybe
to the compromised

. . .

Madness.       Suicide.       Murder.
Is there no way out but these?
The enemy, always just out of sight
snowshoeing the next forest, shrouded

In a snowy blur, abominable snowman
—at once the most destructive
and the most elusive being
gunning down the babies at My Lai
vanishing in the face of confrontation

The prince of air and darkness
computing body counts, masturbating
in the factory
of facts.
—Adrienne Rich, from “The Phenomenology of Anger”

What other poet uses such a vocabulary lately? So many are content to speak only of lovers' dramas set in urban living rooms, or play with words till nothing means anything any more. What other poet tells such stories of the world’s tragedies, and our individual ones? They’re the same, of course.

This is bardic, in the old tradition of the poet at the king’s fire, telling the news. This is the voice of the lineage of ancient Jewish prophets, telling the truths no one wants to hear. Contemporary Jewish mystic Rabbi Abraham Heschel once wrote, A prophet is one who interferes with injustice, and that is what we have in Rich’s writing. Can a poem change the world? Perhaps not. But it does have the power to make a reader think about starting to change the world, even if only in their own backyard. Poetry does have the power to inspire. It's only when we treat poetry as a pretty decoration, like a doily on a sewing table, that it does not. If we resist letting poetry become purely decorative, than there are things we can still say with it.

Even more than the poems themselves, I keep returning to Rich’s ideas about poetry. The poems are thick and muscular, pared down to the limits of language, forceful commentaries on life, what wounds us, on engagement with the world, personally, politically, socially, spiritually. What she wrote about the act of making poetry, the art of the vatic word, is just as muscular.

I keep coming back to what Rich said that poems are meant to be:

Today, I have to say that what I know I know through making poems. Like the novelist who finds that his characters begin to have a life of their own and to demand certain experiences, I find that I can no longer go to write a poem with a neat handful of materials and express those materials acrrording to a prior plan: the poem itself engenders new sensations, new awareness in me as it progresses. Without for one moment turning my back on conscious choice and selection, I have been increasingly willing to let the unconscious offer its materials, to listen to more than the one voice of a single idea. Perhaps a simple way of putting it would be to say that instead of poems about experiences I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it.

Rather than being about an experience, a poem should be an experience. I wholeheartedly agree. I find myself, every time I make a poem, wanting to make it an experience for the reader. I want the poem to recreate for the reader the experience that the poet had that led to the making of the poem. I don’t want to tell about what I experienced, I want to make you share the experience.

Sometimes the closest I can get to that is haiku. I keep making the attempt, even if it often fails. I feel like some of my more experimental poetry, like the Theokritikos series of poems, approaches what we want to do. Having a conversation in a normal tone, but with the heightened language of poetry, that’s what I try to do in the Letters poem series. Other bodies of work have different styles and forms. I’ve talked about cinematic poetry, a poetry that builds a narrative not through conventional grammar and storytelling but through sequencing images in strings that ignite into images in the mind. I think sometimes of Chris Marker’s beautiful and terrifying film, La Jeté, which is a film made up of B&W still photographs, that tell a huge and complex story using very simple means. Poems can be like that, if we allow them the grace to make the attempt, if we let go of our clinging to the words themselves and aim for what lies beyond and behind words.

And how we represent our lives as metaphor. I’ve had the experience of being in the desert just as described by Rich:

Every drought-resistant plant has its own story
each had to learn to live
with less and less water, each would have loved

to laze in long soft rains, in the quiet drip
after the thunderstorm
each could do without deprivation

but where drought is the epic then there must be some
who persist, not by species-betrayal
but by changing themselves

minutely, by a constant study
of the price of continuity
a steady bargain with the way things are
—Adrienne Rich, from the poem “The Desert as Garden of Paradise”

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Other recent articles on Rich:

Poems Good Enough to Eat

Adrienne Rich: Moral Compass

And disabled writer Kenny Fries reflects on how important Rich was to the disabled community:

How Adrienne Rich Taught Me to Drive

RIP Adrienne Rich

March 28, 2012

Poet, prophet, original thinker, essayist, writer, provocateur, feminist, LGBT icon, lightning rod for those who hate to hear free and prophetic voices. Mystic. Poet of consciousness, life, death, suffering and rebirth. There's more I could say, but I'll let her own words speak for her.

•

In creating a situation in which they could nurture and rear infants safely and effectively, women became the civilizers, the inventors of agriculture, of community, some maintain of language itself.

. . .

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

. . .

The most that we can do for one another
Is let our blunders and blind mischances
Argue a certain brusque abrupt compassion.

. . .

a touch is enough to let us know
we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep

. . .

Language cannot do everything—
chalk it up on the walls where the dead poets
lie in their mausoleums.

. . .

You played heroic, necessary
games with death

since in your neo-protestant tribe the void
was supposed not to exist

except as a fashionable concept.

. . .

I had been trying to give birth to myself, and in some grim, dim way I was determined to use even pregnancy and parturition in that process.

•

Update:

Here's the New York Times obituary, which says in part:

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed and widely taught, Ms. Rich was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s.

Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.

She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of “The Feminine Mystique,” did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women’s lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women’s disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.

For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse — often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing — sounding like that of few other poets. . . .

For all her verbal prowess, for all her prolific output, Ms. Rich retained a dexterous command of the plain, pithy utterance. In a 1984 speech she summed up her reason for writing — and, by loud unspoken implication, her reason for being — in just seven words.

What she and her sisters-in-arms were fighting to achieve, she said, was simply this: “the creation of a society without domination.”

•

And here is a short section of a longer poem, "Letters to the Young Poet" from Rich's 1999 collection Midnight Salvage, which I find to be typically fierce and forthright, honest, both present-moment and timeless:

3

Would it gladden you to think
poetry could purely

take its place beneath lightning sheets
or fogdrip     live its own life

screamed at, howled down
by a torn bowel of dripping names

—composers visit Terezin, film-makers, Sarajevo
Cabrini-Green or Edenwald Houses

    ineluctable

if a woman as vivid as any artist
can fling any day herself from the 14th floor

would it relieve you to decide     Poetry
doesn't make this happen?

How Do You Know If a Poem is Good or Bad?

This is probably one of the single most-asked questions. It usually means, especially for poets younger in their art: How do I know that my own poems are any good?

The question is misleading, and opens the door to trouble. Lots of self-appointed critics will try to convince you that their criteria for selection is the one true religion. There are objective criteria, and there are also subjective ones. Beware the authority who insists that their subjective judgment is an objective criteria: they will never give you the whole map, just their tiny corner of it. Always remember that it is much easier to tell if a poem is well-crafted than if it is great.

The truth is: It's an impossible question, with some conditional answers.

But I can tell you how to find all this out for yourself. Here's how:

Read, read, read, read, read, read, read some more, then read. And keep reading.

The more poetry you read, good or bad, the more likely you are to be able to spot something that stands out as great. You are also more likely to learn about clichés and how to avoid them. The more you read, the more you can see what works, and what doesn't. There is no substitute or short-cut for actually reading a lot of poetry. Apprenticeship takes time.

Anyone who claims that all you need to read, in order to write great poems, is their little style manual is lying. They are full of themselves, and wrong. There is no magic bullet.

Each poem is a complete universe, and must be judged on its own terms. Approach it as if you are stepping through a gateway into another world. Dive in, and wade around.

Leave the critical theories at home. If you must read them, read them after you've read the poems. Learning the craft or writing is good, because you need both inspiration and craft, working in harmonious balance, in order to create an outstanding poem. And you can learn a lot about craft just by reading a lot of poems. But do not think that you have arrived at wisdom if all you have studied is craft.

If you want to learn all the linguistic, grammatical and syntactical technical terms in writing, go ahead. But never confuse the trees for the forest. Those tools will help you analyse and understand a poem, and maybe even help you revise one, but they won't help you create one. Never let the tools of analysis dictate what you write; as wonderful as they are, that is not their proper place. If you manage to study the "rules" enough to have internalized them to the point where you don't consciously think about them when writing, all the better. "Learn the rules, forget the rules, break the rules." Which really means, "Transcend the rules."

Remember that academic "creative writing" programs, such as all those shiny new MFAs in poetry, can only teach you analysis and criticism: they are incapable of granting wisdom, or teaching inspiration or vision. They can teach you the tools of analysis, but that's about all they teach. They can help you hone your vision and your voice, if you already have one; but they cannot provide you with one.

I keep returning to what poet Adrienne Rich once said about what poems should do: Instead of being about an experience, a poem should be an experience.

Note that Rich did not say "a poem should move you," or that it's all about feelings. Feelings are only one kind of experience. What she implies is that a poem should pull you all the way into its world for the duration of reading, so that you forget all other words. A poem should be immersive—not only either intellectual or only emotional. It should be a complete experience, in and of itself.

And don't forget to keep reading more poems. If that's all you ever do, that will suffice.

Why Poems Written from the Head Ultimately Fail

It's a common mistake, especially for younger poets: thinking that you control everything about your poem. You don't. If you try to, your poetry will remain stale, shallow, and superficial. You won't find any depth, if your poetry remains entirely produced from your head. Logic-poems and puzzle-box poems are entertaining, but they are signs instead of symbols: they talk about life, but they do not evoke it. (They're also more fun to make than they are to read.) You cannot feel from your head alone. If you insist on only writing poems that you can completely control—writing from your head alone—you will never achieve anything enduring or significant. And you will remain stuck, growing increasingly baffled about why your poetry remains unsatisfying, never quite sure why.

Poet Adrienne Rich, speaking wisely even early in her career, said this very eloquently: Instead of making poems about experiences, one needs to make poems that are experiences.

This is the common mistake: to make poems that are about life, but do not evoke it, or contain it. Most beginning poets fall into this trap; it may be a phase we all need to go through. This is a phase in which we learn our craft, the mechanics of our art, the grammar and syntax and crafty tools that we will use throughout our careening writerly careers. This is the period when we are solving problems: about writing; about poetry; about how to do poetry; even about how to survive while doing it. But this is a student phase. In life, as in art, we are meant to move on. We are meant to grow up, and become more than perpetual students. (In fact, we are meant to become teachers and sages; but that is a story for another time.)

Every time you hear a renowned poet or editor pining for the days when poetry had clear guidelines, clear rules, clear tendencies, and clear subject matters, you are listening to someone who remains stuck in their student days, or in nostalgia about them. Every time you listen to a modern poet complain about free verse, as a loss against rhymed and metered verse, and complain about how free verse signaled the death knell of all good things in poetry, you are listening to a poet stuck in their poetic childhood. Poets can be as puerile and infantile as anyone else. They whine about it more, perhaps, being verbal rather than non-verbal artists—and this whining comes from the truth which they all know in their bones, whether they admit it to themselves or not: the truth that they have been forced to grow up and face the fact that the world is an uncertain, imperfect, indeterminate, sometimes mysterious and frightening place.

When you listen to a poet pining for what is lost, when you are forced to listen to such sentimental nostalgia, you are listening to someone pining for order in the midst of chaos. You are listening to someone who wants a return to the apparent order of the universe of their childhoods, when things seemed to make sense. They are pining for a lost innocence, a paradise lost. At the root of many poets' quest for order within poetry is an unspoken (often unacknowledged) psychological desire for order in their otherwise chaotic lives; they cannot control their lives, they feel out of control in their personal lives, so they seek to impose order wherever they can. No person can be more dictatorial, more autocratic, than one who is afraid of the chaos within themselves. Fascism is a childish impulse given an adult expression. Poetry itself, like all adult things, is meant to be disorderly, contentious, and frequently baffling, and also enlightening and satisfying. The wise poet knows that all things must be in dynamic balance, not static and repressed fixed formalisms. This dynamic balance applies to mindset at least as much as it does to poetic form. Like the sage in the Taoist teachings, only when you have understood and embraced chaos, can you create genuine and enduring order.

So, poems written from the head ultimately fail because they are not mature poems. They are studies—études in the literal sense. They are signs, instead of living symbols. They have activated no energy from the unconscious. They are stale precisely because they do not contain all of life: life teeming in its rich variety and incomprehensible diversity. They contain only ideas, not things.

The poems that a maturing poet makes are not stuck in the head. They include the soma, the heart, the body, the soul, and they also include mystery. They come from places we don't always understand, and cannot always explain. The mark of a maturing and wise poet is to acknowledge that they often don't what they're doing until it's done. Guidance comes from within as well as from without: intuition has just as much place in poetry as do formal rules of construction, rime, grammar, and the other elements of craft. Those are all important and necessary elements: but only the immature poet allows them to dominate their poetry.

Here is the full quote from Adrienne Rich, originally given in 1964 as a statement at a poetry reading:

In the period in which my first two books were written I had a much more absolutist approach to the universe than I now have. I also felt—as many people still feel—that a poem was an arrangement of ideas and feelings, pre-determined, and it said what I had already decided it would say. There were occasional surprises, occasions of happy discovery that an unexpected turn could be taken, but control, technical mastery and intellectual clarity were the real goals, and for many reasons it was satisfying to be able to create this kind of formal order in poems.

Only gradually, within the last five or six years, did I begin to feel that these poems, even the ones I liked best and in which I felt I'd said most, were queerly limited, that in many cases I had suppressed, omitted, falsified even, certain disturbing elements, to gain that perfection of order. . . .

Today, I have to say that what I know I know through making poems. Like the novelist who finds that his characters begin to have a life of their own and to demand certain experiences, I find that I can no longer go to write a poem with a neat handful of materials and express those materials acrrording to a prior plan: the poem itself engenders new sensations, new awareness in me as it progresses. Without for one moment turning my back on conscious choice and selection, I have been increasingly willing to let the unconscious offer its materials, to listen to more than the one voice of a single idea. Perhaps a simple way of putting it would be to say that instead of poems about experiences I am getting poems that are experiences, that contribute to my knowledge and my emotional life even while they reflect and assimilate it. In my earlier poems I told you, as precisely and eloquently as I knew how, about something; in the more recent poems something is happening, something has happened to me and, if I have been a good parent to the poem, something will happen to you who read it. —from Adrienne Rich's Poetry, the Norton Critical Edition (1975), edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, p. 89