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Adrienne Rich Since receiving the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1951 (from judge W.H. Auden), at the age of 21, Adrienne Rich has not stopped writing in her distinct voice, with strength and conviction. Rich has said that her poetry seeks to create a dialectical relationship between “the personal, or lyric voice, and the so-called political — really, the voice of the individual speaking not just to herself, or to a beloved friend, but to and from a collective, a social realm.” Her poetry and prose are taught in literature, creative writing, and gender and gay studies courses across the country and abroad. “Rich writes of disruption, dislocation, disconnection. But she is also ravishingly lyrical, inventive, philosophical, sensual. She makes things whole again.” (National Book Critics Circle citation.)
Adrienne Rich is the recipient of the 1999 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. She has also been distinguished by an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Common Wealth Award in Literature, the National Book Award, the 1996 Tanning Award for Mastery in the Art of Poetry, and the MacArthur Fellowship. In 2003, Adrienne Rich was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. She is the author of more than sixteen volumes of poetry, including, Diving into the Wreck, The Dream of a Common Language, The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001, An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991, Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970, Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995, Midnight Salvage, Fox, and The School Among the Ruins. Her prose books include Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, and Arts of the Possible: Essays & Conversations.
In 2006, Rich was awarded the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. The judges articulated this distinction as follows: “Adrienne Rich ... in recognition of her incomparable influence and achievement as a poet and nonfiction writer. For more than fifty years, her eloquent and visionary writings have shaped the world of poetry as well as feminist and political thought.” Her newest book of poems is Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth (2007). She will publish a new collection of essays, A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, in May 2009.
Biography reprinted by permission of the author from www.barclayagency.com/rich_a. Photo by Lilian Kemp.
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English version
Fox
I needed fox Badly I needed
a vixen for the long time none had come near me
I needed recognition from a
triangulated face burnt-yellow eyes
fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail
I needed history of fox briars of legend it was said she
had run through
I was in want of fox
And the truth of briars she had to have run through
I craved to feel on her pelt if my hands could even slide
past or her body slide between them sharp truth distressing
surfaces of fur
lacerated skin calling legend to account
a vixen’s courage in vixen terms
For a human animal to call for help
on another animal
is the most riven the most revolted cry on earth
come a long way down
Go back far enough it means tearing and torn endless
and sudden
back far enough it blurts
into the birth-yell of the yet-to-be-human child
pushed out of a female the yet-to-be woman
1998
“Fox”, from Fox: Poems 1998-2000 by Adrienne Rich.
Copyright © 2001 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission
of the author and W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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English
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Equinox
Time split like a fruit between dark and light
and a usual fog drags
over this landfall
I’ve walked September end to end
barefoot room to room
carrying in hand a knife well honed for cutting stem or root
or wick eyes open
to abalone shells memorial candle flames
split lemons roses laid
along charring logs Gorgeous things
: : dull acres of developed land as we had named it: Nowhere
wetland burnt garbage burning at its heart
gunmetal thicket midnightblue blood and
tricking masks I thought I knew
history was not a novel
So can I say it was not I listed as Innocence
betrayed you serving (and protesting always)
the motives of my government
thinking we’d scratch out a place
where poetry old subversive shape
grew out of Nowhere here?
where skin could lie on skin
a place “outside the limits”
Can I say I was mistaken?
To be so bruised: in the soft organs skeins of consciousness
Over and over have let it be
damage to others crushing of the animate core
that tone-deaf cutloose ego swarming the world
so bruised: heart spleen long inflamed ribbons of the guts
the spine’s vertical necklace swaying
Have let it swarm
through us let it happen
as it must, inmost
but before this: long before this those other eyes
frontally exposed themselves and spoke
2001
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English
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Transparencies
That the meek word like the righteous word can bully
that an Israeli soldier interviewed years
after the first intifada could mourn on camera
what under orders he did, saw done, did not refuse
that another leaving Beit Jala could scrawl
on a wall: We are truely sorry for the mess we made
is merely routine word that would cancel deed
That human equals innocent and guilty
That we grasp for innocence whether or no
is elementary That words can translate into broken bones
That the power to hurl words is a weapon
That the body can be a weapon
any child on playground knows That asked your favorite word
in a game
you always named a thing, a quality, freedom or river
(never a pronoun, never God or War)
is taken for granted That word and body
are all we have to lay on the line
That words are windowpanes in a ransacked hut, smeared
by time’s dirty rains, we might argue
likewise that words are clear as glass till the sun strikes it blinding
But that in a dark windowpane you have seen your face
That when you wipe your glasses the text grows clearer
That the sound of crunching glass comes at the height of the
wedding
That I can look through glass
into my neighbor’s house
but not my neighbor’s life
That glass is sometimes broken to save lives
That a word can be crushed like a goblet underfoot
is only what it seems, part question, part answer: how
you live it.
2002
“Equinox” and “Transparencies”, from The School Among the Ruins:
Poems 2000-2004 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 2004 by
Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of the author and
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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English
version
This Is Not the Room
of polished tables lit with medalled
torsos bent toward microphones
where ears lean hands scribble
“working the dark side”
---glazed eye meeting frozen eye---
This is not the room where tears down carven
cheeks track rivulets in the scars
left by the gouging tool
where wood itself is weeping
where the ancient painted eye speaks to the living eye
This is the room
where truth scrubs around the pedestal of the toilet
flings her rag into the bucket
straightens up spits at the mirror
2005
Note:
U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney, on NBC’s Meet the Press,
September 16, 2001: “we also have to work, though, sort of, the
dark side ... use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve
our objective.”
“This is Not the Room”, from Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth:
Poems 2004-2006 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 2004 by
Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of the author and
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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