earlier volumes by employing free verse and overtly portraying women's themes. Rich began the next phase of her poetic career with the collectionsNecessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971). These works focus on the relationship between private and public life and openly reject patriarchal culture and language. Diving into the Wreck, Rich's second major transitional work, stands as a radical feminist critique of contemporary society. Many of the poems in this volume assert the importance of reinventing cultural standards in feminist terms and focus on the need for women to achieve self-definition. Her next collections, The Dream of a Common Language (1978) and A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981), are considered lyrical celebrations of the accomplishments of women. In these works Rich examines the lives of historical female figures as well as the everyday experiences of ordinary women. In Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time's Power (1989), and An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), Rich addresses new issues—such as her Jewish heritage and the effects of the Holocaust on her life and work—while continuing to develop feminist ideals. In her most recent collections of poetry, Dark Fields of the Republic (1995), Midnight Salvage (1999), and Fox (2001), Rich focuses on "the interfold of personal and public experience."

In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976)—a volume of essays frequently considered her most forceful statement of radical feminism—Rich discusses the alienation and anger that she contends women experience in their roles as mothers in a patriarchal society. A second collection of essays, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1979), contains prose that furthers her feminist aesthetic, including her most noted essay, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision," in which Rich clarifies the need for female self-actualization. In Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986) Rich continues to explore issues of lesbianism while focusing on such topics as racial identity and racism. In What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993) Rich argues for the importance of poetry as a "social art" throughout human experience. Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (2001) collects some of Rich's best-known essays and adds several new works to her canon.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Since the publication of Diving into the Wreck, most critics have analyzed Rich's work as an artistic expression of feminist politics. While many reviewers have praised her ability to write effectively in numerous verse forms, others have faulted the content of her poems as didactic. Critical commentary on Rich's work has reflected the polemics of her verse; critics who adhere to Rich's politics frequently commend her poems unconditionally, while those who disagree with her radical feminism disavow her work. Additionally, there has been no conclusive appraisal of her canon as Rich continually revises her views and asserts her new approaches to contemporary issues. Most critics concur, however, that Rich's intelligent and innovative portrayals of women have contributed significantly to the feminist movement.

A Change of World (poetry) 1951

The Diamond Cutters, and Other Poems (poetry) 1955

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems, 1954-1962 (poetry) 1963; revised edition, 1967

Necessities of Life: Poems, 1962-1965 (poetry) 1966

Selected Poems (poetry) 1967

Leaflets: Poems, 1965-1968 (poetry) 1969

The Will to Change: Poems, 1968-1970 (poetry) 1971

Diving into the Wreck (poetry) 1973

Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974 (poetry) 1975

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (criticism) 1976

The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977 (poetry) 1978

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (criticism) 1979

A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems, 1978-1981 (poetry) 1981

The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984 (poetry) 1984

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985 (criticism) 1986

Your Native Land, Your Life (poetry) 1986

Time's Power: Poems, 1985-1988 (poetry) 1989

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems, 1988-1991 (poetry) 1991

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (criticism) 1993

Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems, 1991-1995 (poetry) 1995

Midnight Salvage: Poems, 1995-1998 (poetry) 1999

Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (essays and interviews) 2002

Fox: Poems, 1998-2000 (poetry) 2003

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (nonfiction) 2003

SOURCE: Rich, Adrienne. "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision." In Adrienne Rich's Poetry: Texts of the Poems, the Poet on Her Work, Reviews and Criticism, edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, pp. 90-8. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975.

In the following essay, originally published in the journal College English in October, 1972, Rich encourages readers to reexamine texts by and about women in order to come to a new understanding of women as artists and individuals.

Ibsen's When We Dead Awaken is a play about the use that the male artist and thinker—in the process of creating culture as we know it—has made of women, in his life and in his work; and about a woman's slow struggling awakening to the use to which her life has been put. Bernard Shaw wrote in 1900 of this play:

[Ibsen] shows us that no degradation ever devized or permitted is as disastrous as this degradation; that through it women can die into luxuries for men and yet can kill them; that men and women are becoming conscious of this; and that what remains to be seen as perhaps the most interesting of all imminent social developments is what will happen "when we dead awaken".¹

It's exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful. This awakening of dead or sleeping consciousness has already affected the lives of millions of women, even those who don't know it yet. It is also affecting the lives of men, even those who deny its claims upon them. The argument will go on whether an oppressive economic class system is responsible for the oppressive nature of male/female relations, or whether, in fact, the sexual class system is the original model on which all the others are based. But in the last few years connections have been drawn between our sexual lives and our political institutions, which are inescapable and illuminating. The sleepwalkers are coming awake, and for the first time this awakening has a collective reality; it is no longer such a lonely thing to open one's eyes.

Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for us more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for woman, is more than a search for identity: it is part of her refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. A radical critique of litterature, feminist in its impulse, would take the work first of all as a clue to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us; and how we can begin to see—and therefore live—afresh. A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order re-assert itself in every new revolution. We need to know the writing of the past, and know it differently than we have ever known it; not to pass on a tradition but to break its hold over us.

For writers, and at this moment for women writers in particular, there is the challenge and promise of a whole new psychic geography to be explored. But there is also a difficult and dangerous walking on the ice, as we try to find language and images for a consciousness we are just coming into, and with little in the past to support us. I want to talk about some apects of this difficulty and this danger.

Jane Harrison, the great classical anthropologist, wrote in 1914 in a letter to her friend Gilbert Murray:

By the by, about "Women," it has bothered me often—why do women never want to write poetry about Man as a sex—why is Woman a dream and a terror to man and not the other way around?…Is it mere convention and propriety, or something deeper?²

I think Jane Harrison's question cuts deep into the myth-making tradition, the romantic tradition; deep into what women and men have been to each other; and deep into the psyche of the woman writer. Thinking about that question, I began thinking of the work of two 20th-century women poets, Sylvia Plath and Diane Wakoski. It strikes me that in the work of both Man appears as, if not a dream, a fascination and a terror; and that the source of the fascination and the terror is, simply, Man's power—to dominate, tyrannize, choose, or reject the woman. The charisma of Man seems to come purely from his power over her and his control of the world by force, not from anything fertile or life-giving in him. And, in the work of both these poets, it is finally the woman's sense of herself—embattled, possessed—that gives the poetry its dynamic charge, its rhythms of struggle, need, will, and female energy. Convention and propriety are perhaps not the right words, but until recently this female anger and this furious awareness of the Man's power over her were not available materials to the female poet, who tended to write of Love as the source of her suffering, and to view that victimization by Love as an almost inevitable fate. Or, like Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, she kept human sexual relationships at a measured and chiselled distance in her poems.

One answer to Jane Harrison's question has to be that historically men and women have played very different parts in each others' lives. Where woman has been a luxury for man, and has served as the painter's model and the poet's muse, but also as comforter, nurse, cook, bearer of his seed, secretarial assistant and copyist of manuscripts, man has played a quite different role for the female artist. Henry James repeats an incident which the writer Prosper Mérimée described, of how, while he was living with George Sand,

he once opened his eyes, in the raw winter dawn, to see his companion, in a dressing-gown, on her knees before the domestic hearth, a candlestick beside her and a red madras round her head, making bravely, with her own hands, the fire that was to enable her to sit down betimes to urgent pen and paper. The story represents him as having felt that the spectacle chilled his ardor and tried his taste; her appearance was unfortunate, her occupation an inconsequence, and her industry a reproof—the result of all of which was a lively irritation and an early rupture.³

I am suggesting that the specter of this kind of male judgment, along with the active discouragement and thwarting of her needs by a culture controlled by males, has created problems for the woman writer: problems of contact with herself, problems of language and style, problems of energy and survival.

In rereading Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own for the first time in some years, I was astonished at the sense of effort, of pains taken, of dogged tentativeness in the tone of that essay. And I recognized that tone. I had heard it often enough, in myself and in other women. It is the tone of a woman almost in touch with her anger, who is determined not to appear angry, who is willing herself to be calm, detached, and even charming in a roomful of men where things have been said which are attacks on her very integrity. Virginia Woolf is addressing an audience of women, but she is acutely conscious—as she always was—of being overheard by men: by Morgan and Lytton and Maynard Keynes and for that matter by her father, Leslie Stephen. She drew the language out into an exacerbated thread in her determination to have her own sensibility yet protect it from those masculine presences. Only at rare moments in that essay do you hear the passion in her voice; she was trying to sound as cool as Jane Austen, as Olympian as Shakespeare, because that is the way the men of the culture thought a writer should sound.

No male writer has written primarily or even largely for women, or with the sense of women's criticism as a consideration when he chooses his materials, his theme, his language. But to a lesser or greater extent, every woman writer has written for men even when, like Virginia Woolf, she was supposed to be addressing women. If we have come to the point when this balance might begin to change, when women can stop being haunted, not only by "convention and propriety" but by internalized fears of being and saying themselves, then it is an extraordinary moment for the women writer—and reader.

I have hesitated to do what I am going to do now, which is to use myself as an illustration. For one thing, it's a lot easier and less dangerous to talk about other women writers. But there is something else. Like Virginia Woolf, I am aware of the women who are not with us here because they are washing the dishes and looking after the children. Nearly fifty years after she spoke, that fact remains largely unchanged. And I am thinking also of women whom she left out of the picture altogether—women who are washing other people's dishes and caring for other people's children, not to mention women who went on the streets last night in order to feed their children. We seem to be special women here, we have liked to think of ourselves as special, and we have known that men would tolerate, even romanticize us as special, as long as our words and actions didn't threaten their privilege of tolerating or rejecting us according to their ideas of what a special woman ought to be. An important insight of the radical women's movement, for me, has been how divisive and how ultimately destructive is this myth of the special woman, who is also the token woman. Every one of us here in this room has had great luck—we are teachers, writers, academicians; our own gifts could not have been enough, for we all know women whose gifts are buried or aborted. Our struggles can have meaning only if they can help to change the lives of women whose gifts—and whose very being—continue to be thwarted.

My own luck was being born white and middle-class into a house full of books, with a father who encouraged me to read and write. So for about twenty years I wrote for a particular man, who criticized and praised me and made me feel I was indeed "special." The obverse side of this, of course, was that I tried for a long time to please him, or rather, not to displease him. And then of course there were other men—writers, teachers—the Man, who was not a terror or a dream but a literary master and a master in other ways less easy to acknowledge. And there were all those poems about women, written by men: it seemed to be a given that men wrote poems and women frequently inhabited them. These women were almost always beautiful, but threatened with the loss of beauty, the loss of youth—the fate worse than death. Or, they were beautiful and died young, like Lucy and Lenore. Or, the woman was like Maud Gonne, cruel and disastrously mistaken, and the poem reproached her because she had refused to become a luxury for the poet.

A lot is being said today about the influence that the myths and images of women have on all of us who are products of culture. I think it has been a peculiar confusion to the girl or woman who tries to write because she is peculiarly susceptible to language. She goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she too has been putting words and images together; she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over in the "words' masculine persuasive force" of literature she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men. She finds a terror and a dream, she finds a beautiful pale face, she finds La Belle Dame Sans Merci, she finds Juliet or Tess or Salomé, but precisely what she does not find is that absorbed, drudging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to put words together.

So what does she do? What did I do? I read the older women poets with their peculiar keenness and ambivalence: Sappho, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Elinor Wylie, Edna Millay, H. D. I discovered that the woman poet most admired at the time (by men) was Marianne Moore, who was maidenly, elegant, intellectual, discreet. But even in reading these women I was looking in them for the same things I had found in the poetry of men, because I wanted women poets to be the equals of men, and to be equal was still confused with sounding the same.

I know that my style was formed first by male poets: by the men I was reading as an undergraduate—Frost, Dylan Thomas, Donne, Auden, MacNiece, Stevens, Yeats. What I chiefly learned from them was craft. But poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know. Looking back at poems I wrote before I was 21, I'm startled because beneath the conscious craft are glimpses of the split I even then experienced between the girl who wrote poems, who defined herself in writing poems, and the girl who was to define herself by her relationships with men. "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers," written while I was a student, looks with deliberate detachment at this split. In writing this poem, composed and apparently cool as it is, I thought I was creating a portrait of an imaginary woman. But this woman suffers from the opposition of her imagination, worked out in tapestry, and her life-style, "ringed with ordeals she was mastered by." It was important to me that Aunt Jennifer was a person as distinct from myself as possible—distanced by the formalism of the poem, by its objective, observant tone—even by putting the woman in a different generation.

In those years formalism was part of the strategy—like asbestos gloves, it allowed me to handle materials I couldn't pick up barehanded. (A later strategy was to use the persona of a man, as I did in "The Loser.") I finished college, published my first book by a fluke, as it seemed to me, and broke off a love affair. I took a job, lived alone, went on writing, fell in love. I was young, full of energy, and the book seemed to mean that others agreed I was a poet. Because I was also determined to have a "full" woman's life, I plunged in my early twenties into marriage and had three children before I was thirty. There was nothing overt in the environment to warn me: these were the fifties, and in reaction to the earlier wave of feminism, middle-class women were making careers of domestic perfection, working to send their husbands through professional schools, then retiring to raise large families. People were moving out to the suburbs, technology was going to be the answer to everything, even sex; the family was in its glory. Life was extremely private; women were isolated from each other by the loyalties of marriage. I have a sense that women didn't talk to each other much in the fifties—not about their secret emptinesses, their frustrations. I went on trying to write; my second book and first child appeared in the same month. But by the time that book came out I was already dissatisfied with those poems, which seemed to me mere exercises for poems I hadn't written. The book was praised, however, for its "gracefulness"; I had a marriage and a child. If there were doubts, if there were periods of null depression or active despairing, these could only mean that I was ungrateful, insatiable, perhaps a monster.

About the time my third child was born, I felt that I had either to consider myself a failed woman and a failed poet, or to try to find some synthesis by which to understand what was happening to me. What frightened me most was the sense of drift, of being pulled along on a current which called itself my destiny, but in which I seemed to be losing touch with whoever I had been, with the girl who had experienced her own will and energy almost ecstatically at times, walking around a city or riding a train at night or typing in a student room. In a poem about my grandmother I wrote (of myself): "A young girl, thought sleeping, is certified dead."⁴ I was writing very little, partly from fatigue, that female fatigue of suppressed anger and the loss of contact with her own being; partly from the discontinuity of female life with its attention to small chores, errands, work that others constantly undo, small children's constant needs. What I did write was unconvincing to me; my anger and frustration were hard to acknowledge in or out of poems because in fact I cared a great deal about my husband and my children. Trying to look back and understand that time I have tried to analyze the real nature of the conflict. Most, if not all, human lives are full of fantasy—passive daydreaming which need not be acted on. But to write poetry or fiction, or even to think well, is not to fantasize, or to put fantasies on paper. For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive. And a certain freedom of the mind is needed—freedom to press on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, that the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away. Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment. You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming. Now, to be maternally with small children all day in the old way, to be with a man in the old way of marriage, requires a holding-back, a putting-aside of that imaginative activity, and seems to demand instead a kind of conservatism. I want to make it clear that I am not saying that in order to write well, or think well, it is necessary to become unavailable to others, or to become a devouring ego. This has been the myth of the masculine artist and thinker; and I repeat, I do not accept it. But to be a female human being trying to fulfill traditional female functions in a traditional way is in direct conflict with the subversive function of the imagination. The word traditional is important here. There must be ways, and we will be finding out more and more about them, in which the energy of creation and the energy of relation can be united. But in those earlier years I always felt the conflict as a failure of love in myself. I had thought I was choosing a full life: the life available to most men, in which sexuality, work, and parenthood could coexist. But I felt, at 29, guilt toward the people closest to me, and guilty toward my own being.

I wanted, then, more than anything, the one thing of which there was never enough: time to think, time to write. The fifties and early sixties were years of rapid revelations: the sit-ins and marches in the South, the Bay of Pigs, the early anti-war movement, raised large questions—questions for which the masculine world of the academy around me seemed to have expert and fluent answers. But I needed desperately to think for myself—about pacifism and dissent and violence, about poetry and society and about my own relationship to all these things. For about ten years I was reading in fierce snatches, scribbling in notebooks, writing poetry in fragments; I was looking desperately for clues, because if there were no clues then I thought I might be insane. I wrote in a notebook about this time:

Paralyzed by the sense that there exists a mesh of relationships—e.g. between my anger at the children, my sensual life, pacifism, sex, (I mean sex in its broadest significance, not merely sexual desire)—an interconnectedness which, if I could see it, make it valid, would give me back myself, make it possible to function lucidly and passionately. Yet I grope in and out among these dark webs.

I think I began at this point to feel that politics was not something "out there" but something "in here" and of the essence of my condition.

In the late fifties I was able to write, for the first time, directly about experiencing myself as a woman. The poem was jotted in fragments during children's naps, brief hours in a library, or at 3 a.m. after rising with a wakeful child. I despaired of doing any continuous work at this time. Yet I began to feel that my fragments and scraps had a common consciousness and a common theme, one which I would have been very unwilling to put on paper at an earlier time because I had been taught that poetry should be "universal," which meant, of course, non-female. Until then I had tried very much not to identify myself as a female poet. Over two years I wrote a 10-part poem called "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," in a longer, looser mode than I'd ever trusted myself with before. It was an extraordinary relief to write that poem. It strikes me now as too literary, too dependent on allusion; I hadn't found the courage yet to do without authorities, or even to use the pronoun "I"—the woman in the poem is always "she." One section of it, No. 2, concerns a woman who thinks she is going mad; she is haunted by voices telling her to resist and rebel, voices which she can hear but not obey.

The poem "Orion," written five years later, is a poem of reconnection with a part of myself I had felt I was losing—the active principle, the energetic imagination, the "half-brother" whom I projected, as I had for many years, into the constellation Orion. It's no accident that the words "cold and egotistical" appear in this poem, and are applied to myself. The choice still seemed to be between "love"—womanly, maternal love, altruistic love—a love defined and ruled by the weight of an entire culture; and egotism—a force directed by men into creation, achievement, ambition, often at the expense of others, but justifiably so. For weren't they men, and wasn't that their destiny as womanly love was ours? I know now that the alternatives are false ones—that the word "love" is itself in need of re-vision.

There is a companion poem to "Orion," written three years later, in which at last the woman in the poem and the woman writing the poem become the same person. It is called "Planetarium," and it was written after a visit to a real planetarium, where I read an account of the work of Caroline Herschel, the astronomer, who worked with her brother William, but whose name remained obscure, as his did not.

In closing I want to tell you about a dream I had last summer. I dreamed I was asked to read my poetry at a mass women's meeting, but when I began to read, what came out were the lyrics of a blues song. I share this dream with you because it seemed to me to say a lot about the problems and the future of the woman writer, and probably of women in general. The awakening of consciousness is not like the crossing of a frontier—one step, and you are in another country. Much of woman's poetry has been of the nature of the blues song: a cry of pain, of victimization, or a lyric of seduction. And today, much poetry by women—and prose for that matter—is charged with anger. I think we need to go through that anger, and we will betray our own reality if we try, as Virginia Woolf was trying, for an objectivity, a detachment, that would make us sound more like Jane Austen or Shakespeare. We know more than Jane Austen or Shakespeare knew: more than Jane Austen because our lives are more complex, more than Shakespeare because we know more about the lives of women, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf included.

Both the victimization and the anger experienced by women are real, and have real sources, everywhere in the environment, built into society. They must go on being tapped and explored by poets, among others. We can neither deny them, nor can we rest there. They are our birth-pains, and we are bearing ourselves. We would be failing each other as writers and as women, if we neglected or denied what is negative, regressive, or Sisyphean in our inwardness.

We all know that there is another story to be told. I am curious and expectant about the future of the masculine consciousness. I feel in the work of the men whose poetry I read today a deep pessimism and fatalistic grief; and I wonder if it isn't the masculine side of what women have experienced, the price of masculine dominance. One thing I am sure of: just as woman is becoming her own midwife, creating herself anew, so man will have to learn to gestate and give birth to his own subjectivity—something he has frequently wanted woman to do for him. We can go on trying to talk to each other, we can sometimes help each other, poetry and fiction can show us what the other is going through; but women can no longer be primarily mothers and muses for men: we have our own work cut out for us.

Notes

1. G. B. Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (Hill and Wang, 1922), p. 139.
2. J. G. Stewart, Jane Ellen Harrison: A Portrait from Letters (London, 1959), p. 140.
3. Henry James, "Notes on Novelists" in Selected Literary Criticism of Henry James, ed. Morris Shapira (London: Heineman, 1963), pp. 157-58.
4. "Halfway," in Necessities of Life.

SOURCE: Stimpson, Catharine. "Adrienne Rich and Lesbian/Feminist Poetry." Parnassus 12-13, nos. 2-1 (spring-summer and fall-winter 1985): 249-68.

In the following essay, Stimpson traces the development of lesbian and feminist themes throughout Rich's poetic career.

… it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat.¹

Four years after … (Adrienne Rich) published her first book, I read it in almost disbelieving wonder; someone my age was writing down my life … I had not known till then how much I had wanted a contemporary and a woman as a speaking voice of life.…²

"Lesbian." For many, heterosexual or homosexual, the word still constricts the throat. Those "slimy" sibilants; those "nasty" nasalities. "Lesbian" makes even "feminist" sound lissome, decent, sane. In 1975, Adrienne Rich's reputation was secure.³ She might have eased up and toyed with honors. Yet, she was doing nothing less than seizing and caressing that word: "lesbian." She was working hard for "a whole new poetry" that was to begin in two women's "limitless desire."⁴

Few poetic things could be more difficult—even for a writer of such fire, stone, and fern. For the "intense charge of the word lesbian, and… all its deliquescences of meaning …, "(On Lies, Secrets, and Silence 202) necessarily provoke readings that are potent, but confused, confusing, and contradictory. Some of us read Rich with disbelieving wonder. Imagine being a mother, in court, on the stand, in the dock, during a child custody case. Your husband's lawyer asks, with brutal repetition, "When did you first kiss this woman?" Imagine, then, the gratitude and relief of hearing … [The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977, p. 59].

Yet, others read with wondrous disbelief. Alicia Ostriker, my colleague, pugnaciously declared Rich's "myth" of female sexuality "too narrow":

"I find the Lesbian Imperative offensively totalitarian, and would prefer to defend human diversity as well as human liberty."⁵

To add to the mess, even some of the supporters and defenders of Rich's sexual ideology find the call for a "whole new poetry" an emblazoned naiveté. Surely, they whisper nervously, she must know about our post-structural awareness of the nature of the sign. Surely, she must realize that language is a fiction, not a transparent vehicle of truth; that signifiers are bits and bytes of an arbitrary system, not elements in a holistic union of word and idea, word and thing. Surely, she must now admit that this system creates the human subject, not the other way around.⁶ Others grumble that Rich's theory contradicts her poetic practice. The first is new, the second old. Rhetorically, she is more like—well, Robert Lowell—than Gertrude Stein. Rich undermines her calls for action, Marjorie Perloff claims, because of her "… conservative rhetoric, a rhetoric indistinguishable from the Male Oppressor."⁷

This messiness is ironic—if only because Rich herself is radiantly clear. She is, of course, one of a number of outspoken lesbian poets of the last part of the American Century. She resists being laid down as the star track in what ought to be a multiple-trek tape of the language of such women as Judy Grahn, Susan Griffin, Marilyn Hacker, Audre Lorde, Susan Sherman. "To isolate what I write," she has warned, "from a context of other women writing and speaking feels like an old, painfully familiar critical strategy."⁸ Yet, I want, in gratitude and relief, to spell out how she has moved from the constriction of the throat to the construction of the page.

Before the 1970s, Rich had published poems about the feelings, social relations, and mythic promise of women. "Women" (1968) sees three sisters "… sitting / on rocks of black obsidian," versions of the fates. (Poems Selected and New, 1950-1974, 109) Deromanticizing heterosexual love, Rich had written of the strains and loneliness within marriage. Symbolically, she had put aside a 1962 poem, "For Judith, Taking Leave."⁹ Here a speaker longingly memorializes another woman, Judith: "… a singular event … a beautiful thing I saw." (PSN [Poems Selected and New, 1950-1974,] 132) The speaker praises feminist predecessors who "suffered ridicule" for them. Then, in the middle of the poem, she calls out.… PSN, 132].

Only to add, as the line runs on to the next, "with two men—."

In the early 1970s, Rich riskily uncoiled the repressed sexual and psychological materials that she had once coiled and from which she had subsequently recoiled. She announces that release in "Re-forming the Crystal." Addressed to a man, it gives him his due, and discharge. The speaker first imagines what male sexuality, "desire / centered in a cock," might feel like. However, she passes on, old identity gone. Voice at once tough and exultant, she states, "my photo on the license isnotme.…" (PSN, 228) She will move, a key word in Rich's vocabulary of action, to "… the field of a poem wired with danger … into the cratered night of female memory.…"Women now live to the nerves' limit with women. Inevitably, some poems counterpoint past identity with present; tradition with radical change. "For L. G.: Unseen for Twenty Years" ruefully wonders who, and where, a male homosexual might be. He and the speaker had been boon travelling companions twenty years before, when both were turning to men.

Significantly, "Re-forming the Crystal" alternates vertical columns of "poetry" with paragraphs of "prose." For Rich was producing controversial, influential prose as well as poetry. From 1981 to 1983, she and Michelle Cliff were to edit Sinister Wisdom, a lesbian/feminist journal. Rich, a sophisticated student of the genetics of the text, coherently crossed autobiography with biography; polemic with scholarship; political theory with literary criticism.¹⁰ In part, her transgressions of generic conventions are the deconstructive gestures of post-modernism—without much manic play or ludic romps. In greater part, her mingling of "subjective" and "objective" genres, advocacy and argument, demonstrates her belief in their inseparability. Her style also emblemizes the position of contemporary, educated women. No longer forced to choose between public or private lives, women can lead both—at once. No longer forced to choose between writing about public or private concerns, women can take on both—at once.¹¹

Rich had consistently been "a poet of ideas,"¹² of hewn arguments as well as images. Now her ideas, doubly sited, could reinforce and annotate each other. In its totality, her work is that of a kind of conceptual artist. What is disturbing and dazzling is not the familiar notion of a conceptual artist, but the content of her ideas. Rich's lesbian/feminism reveals both the steely, stubborn logic of the geometrician (or the convert) and the sinuousness of imaginative reason. Those who insist that she is the Great Generalissima of Lesbian Poetry resist granting her her habitual gift for pragmatic self-revision and subtlety. "… the subject of truth," she noted in 1975. "There is nothing simple or easy about this idea. There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'—truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity." (LSS [On Lies, Secrets, and Silence,] 187) Yet, she consistently walks out from the cultural space in which the libraries of her father and of Harvard University had enclosed her. She announces the primacy of a woman's perspective and of women as subjects. The eye of the female writing "I" fastens on the presence of a woman. The voice of the inquiring woman asks of herself and other women: "… how she came to be for-herself and how she identified with and was able to use women's culture, a women's tradition; and what the presence of other women meant in her life." (LSS, 158)

Rich, as other feminists were doing, insists upon an idea of time as a tragic process, a fall into patriarchy. However, she promises, we can reverse that process. We can outwrestle, outwit, and feminize time. Skillfully, Rich splices two mutually enhancing narratives together that dramatize her idea of time's procession. The first is that of the self. In her prose, Rich persistently tests her generalizations against her own experiences. In her poetry, she articulates experience and discovers its meaning. Though the poetic self has a vast capacity for experiences, it reveals itself, rather than develops, in time. Indeed, a measure of development is the degree of revelation. So convinced, Rich assumes the primacy of the primal self. Appropriately, then, "Natural Resources" brilliantly extends the trope of the woman miner, as both rhetorical and historical figure. The miner excavates experience to find buried strata. In other passages, Rich is a Dickinsonian surgeon, "… cutting away / dead flesh, cauterizing old scars.…" (DCL [The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977,] 70) She rips away the tissue that covers old wounds, old traumas, to recover the origins of self and pain.

In her narrative, Rich is a child whom two women (one white, one black) first love before they turn her over to the father. The reality of the maternal body gives way to the "charisma" of the father's "… assertive mind and temperament.…"¹³ Her reward for their rejection, and her loss, is his approval and the power of language, the conviction that "… language, writing, those pages of print could teach me how to live, could tell me what was possible." (LSS, 200) She becomes a child-of-the-word, unable to see that those pages veil and erase the feminine. Rich is no fan of psychoanalysis, but its tales and that of her passage from the tender passions of the realm of the mother to the symbolic order of the domain of the father half-echo each other.

Educated, a published poet, her father's pride, Rich then rejects the father—to marry a man he despises. She bears three sons. As Rich knows, but never exploits, the sheer masculinity of her heterosexual experience (the husband, the long marriage, the sons) burnishes her credibility as a witness of, and for, lesbianism. That credibility challenges a popular perception that lesbians are maculately sterile—either because they are butches, imitation men, or femmes, who will never receive the sperm of real men.

Rich's second narrative is that of any child, female or male. For them, "The mother-child relationship is the essential human relationship." (Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, 127) Binding the two are the sucking mouth, the milky nipple, the mutual gaze. Then, the father—his demands, commands, needs, and seductions—will pick at those bonds; pick up his children and possess them all in a "savagely fathered and unmothered world." (PSN, 237) Heterosexual institutions damage both sons and daughters, but, Rich insists, in the crucial axiom of feminist theory, they damage women far more than men. Those institutions embody sufficient psychological, economic, social, and legal power to compel heterosexuality.¹⁴ That compulsion redirects women away from the first and most profound object of love, the mother. Rich writes: "Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has laid in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement." (OWB [Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution,] 225-26)

To redeem her past, and to begin her future, Rich must return to the mother's body, in memory or with other women. So must all women. Their sources are their natural resources. In a 1963 poem about marriage, Rich, in one of the crazy intuitive flashes we label the cognitive gift of poetry, describes wanting husband to be mother … ["Like This Together," (FD) The Fact of a Door-frame: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984].¹⁵

Not until she becomes a lesbian is she content; not until then can desire fulfill its needs. In Twenty-One Love Poems, she writes of her female lover's … [tongue and fingers.… DCL, 32].

The fecundity of woman is such that she can also give birth to and mother herself. Her body can be her "crib"; she can be her own "midwife." She can then become a matrix that mothers others, through personality or the page. Some evidence: in 1975, Nancy Milford, the writer, read through Rich's poetry. She had a dream of the person within "Diving into the Wreck." A maternal figure was walking towards, and empowering, her: "… naked, swaying, bending down … her full breasts brushing my cheek, moving toward my mouth … The hands of that diving woman become our own hands, reaching out, touching, holding; not in sex but in deliverance. That is the potency of her poetry.…"¹⁶

As Rich grounds women's thoughts and feelings in their bodies, she naturalizes them. Her poetry harvests the earth and the elements for its metaphors: the cave; trees; plants; flowers; fields; the volcano, at once peak to ascend and crater into which to descend, breast and genitals, cervix, womb. Rich, too, has absolute competence in composing a poem, in arranging implosive patterns of rhythm and sound. Because the quality of her verbal music and choreography is so assured, a reader learns to trust the palpability of a poem; its replication of the intellectual and emotional movements of experience.

Because of the pressure and magnetism of her metaphors; because of the surprising physicality of her lines; and because of her contempt for patriarchal culture, especially in its modern and urban forms, Rich may seem to be endorsing a feminized primitivism. However, she is far too intelligent a grammarian of reality to parse it into two opposing spheres of "nature" and "culture," and clamor only for the pristine ecological purities of the first. She constructs houses on her land. Rich's dream, her imaginative vision, is of an organic, but freeing, unity among body, nature, consciousness, vision, and community. Unequivocally, lyrically, she asks women to think through their maternal flesh and their own bodies, "… to connect what has been so cruelly disorganized—our great mental capacities, hardly used; our highly developed tactile sense; our genius for close observation; our complicated, pain-enduring, multi-pleasured physicality." (OWB, 284) In a leap of faith, she wants women to become the presiding geniuses of their bodies in order to create new life—biologically and culturally. Their thoughts and visions will transform politics, "… alter human existence," sustain a "new relationship to the universe." (OWB, 285-86)

The primal bonds among mothers, sisters, and daughters are the soil from which lesbianism grows. Lesbianism does mean women's erotic passion. Indeed, the most explicitly erotic lyric in Twenty-One Love Poems is "(The Floating Poem, Unnumbered)," as if physical passion drifts and runs like a deep current through the seas of the connection between "I" and "you" in the sequence. However, Rich declares, in a move that lesbian/feminism, but not the culture-at-large, accepts, the lesbian cannot live only in and with love. "I want to call this, life." Rich writes, "But I can't call it life until we start to move / beyond this secret circle of fire.…" (DCL, 9) Moreover, a lesbianism that is more than a treasured carnality is a synecdoche for any female sexuality. Rich, like Monique Wittig, projects "… lesbian love (a)s a paradigm of female sexuality that is neither defined by men nor exploited by a phallocentric political system."¹⁷

Even more than a fancily labelled metaphor, even more than a schematized paradigm, lesbianism forms a "continuum," a range of "womanidentified" activities that embraces eros, friendship and intensity between women, resistance to gynephobia, and female strength. A woman can love men, live with men, and inhabit a point on this continuum—if she has managed some distance from patriarchal heterosexuality. For its imprisoning institutions have ripped daughters from mothers; lobotomized and slashed women's psychological, cultural, and political energies. As the brief accumulates in "Compulsory Heterosexuality," Rich mourns: "The denial of reality and visibility to women's passion for women, women's choice of women as allies, life companions, and community; the forcing of such relationships into dissimulation and their disintegration under intense pressure have meant an incalculable loss to the power of all women to change the social relations of the sexes, to liberate ourselves and each other." (657) "Transcendental Etude," a chiselled monument of a poem, dedicated to Michelle Cliff, elegizes "rootless, dismembered" women, whose "Birth stripped our birthright from us, / tore us from a woman, from women, from ourselves." (DCL, 75)

If women are to change themselves and their social relations, if they are to liberate themselves and each other, they must revivify that lesbianism hidden or denied, feared or despised. Lesbianism is an imperative, not because Rich imposes it, but because it is a wellspring of identity that must be sprung if women are to claim any authentic identity at all. "It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack." (LSS, 201) I remember Rich giving us these words, quietly, tautly, in a New York hotel ballroom, in 1976, at a panel at the Modern Language Association. She leaned forward from a dais, where three other poets were also sitting: June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Honor Moore. I was on a chipped and gilded chair, between two scholar/critics: one a divorced mother, heterosexual, who called herself a lesbian out of political sympathy, a radical feminist act of the late 1960s and early 1970s; the second a married mother, about to begin a secret love affair with a woman, who rarely (if ever) spoke about lesbianism. "Right on," said the first. Enigmatically, the second looked at the husband next to her. Grinning, with the casualness of marriage, he affectionately slapped her thigh. There we were—an imperfect, blurry shadow of Rich's continuum.

Deftly, Rich's theories of female sexuality invert the accusatory slander that lesbianism is "unnatural." To Rich, what is "unnatural" is not the presence, but the absence, of women's bodies, to be "homesick … for a woman.…" (DCL, 75) In the 1970s, her theories were influenced by, and influences on, the cultural feminism that was a powerful strain in feminist thinking, particularly about sexuality, culture, and identity.¹⁸ Reconstituting and eroticizing nineteenth-century ideologies of gender, with their endorsement of "female" and "male" spheres, cultural feminism tends to divide the world into female and male; to idealize female sexuality and being, and to demonize male sexuality and doing. Ironically, some of the principles of cultural feminism gravitate toward a conservative ideology that prefers divinely authorized gender roles and "female" and "male" behaviors that fit squarely into them. However, cultural feminism's preference for women's communities, its commitment to women's self-determination, and its loathing of patriarchal heterosexuality dismay, and repel, right-wing flappers in the Eagle Forum and their ilk.

To discover that female sexuality and being, women are to nurture natural, but defaced and obliterated, capacities for nurture and for nature itself. With the help of scholars and artists, they are to unearth primal images of these capacities, and of rituals with which to celebrate them. Some of Rich's most poignant, lambent poems present the poet as a priestess in a service with a lost script; in a liturgy with missing words. In "Toward the Solstice," she laments that she does not know "in what language to address / the spirits that claim a place / beneath these low and simple ceilings." (DCL, 69) She fears that she has forgotten or failed to say the "right rune"; to "perform the needed acts.…" (70)

Such theories were to serve neither abstract debate (a "male" activity) nor mere poetic need (a self-indulgent sport). On the contrary. They were to be designs for action and for communal life. As a result, cultural feminists have taken sides in some of the most volatile political quarrels within United States feminism: How separate from the rest of society are women's groups to be? What is the relationship of feminism to other political movements and to the New Left? What is the meaning of pornography? What, if anything, should be done to banish it? Many of Rich's poems refer immediately to those fights. The controversial "For Ethel Rosenberg," for example, speaks vocatively to "Ethel Greenglass Rosenberg" … [(WP) A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far].¹⁹

"Take back the night" is a slogan and rallying cry for the anti-pornography movement that cultural feminism has conceived and organized. The words have inspired women. They flatten Rich's poem. Their presence gives some critics permission to tsk-tsk and scold Rich for letting a political agenda master a poet's imagination. She might legitimately scorn their motives and the blatancy of the division they invent between politics and poetry. However, she, too, is warily aware of any domination of her imagination. She fears the hunters, trappers, and wardens of the mind. One of her toughest poems, "North American Time," written in the gritty style of much of A Wild Patience, starts … [FD, 324].

Something hardens the difficulty of interweaving a passionate fidelity to a politics that wants to change the laws of history; to the imagination; and to the unconscious, which nourishes the imagination as mother does the child: the very terms of Rich's politics. For lesbian/feminism, the casting of the world as a duality of dominating male and damaged female carries the virus of a double threat: it reduces the world to a duality; it reduces women to a monolith. Rich distrusts the false universal, especially among women, who are to think more specifically than men. A resonant section of "Natural Resources," the 1977 revision of "Diving Into the Wreck," rejects the words "humanism" and "androgyny." They are falsely universal; therefore, universally false.

Rich has wonderfully escaped the nets she fears, the "impasse" at which some critics pin her.²⁰ In part, she does so because of the Jamesian (William) belief in change that has marked all her work. We must live in an Einsteinian world of flux and chance that has neither "center nor circumference."²¹ We must work and wish for a world, not as it is, but as it might be. Yet, we must respond to time present as it presents and represents itself. Because errors and lapses can stain our responses, we must abandon dreams of purity, of final cures, of a process with an end.

Logically, then, responsibly, the lesbian/feminist Rich has continued to rewrite her sense of self and politics; to question what it means to "cast my lot" in the world and to be "accountable." More and more deeply, she has engaged the structures and pain of racism. She has said that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s lifted her "… out of a sense of personal frustration and hopelessness."²² However, the 1970s had to teach her the harsh stiffness of her own "racist blinders." Black women's response to Of Woman Born had to school her in her ignorance about them.²³ Rich believes that political poetry emerges from the self's encounter with the world. Her explorations of race start with her black nurse, her other mother. Necessarily, she cannot rest there. She must go on to still other structures, other pains, of domination. Racism is inseparable from still another vise and vice of modern politics: colonialism. "To understand colonization," she writes, with self-consciousness and some self-contempt, "is taking me / years." (A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, 55)

Some of Rich's most ambitious lesbian/feminist poems speak for all women and mourn their suffering, affliction, and powerlessness: "From an Old House in America," "Culture and Anarchy," "For Julia in Nebraska." Like Rich's poems about her grandmothers, they offer women their history; the arts of their endurance. Because Rich fuses women with nature, especially with the land, a history of people is a pangyneric record of place as well.

However, the recognition of racism and colonialism demands that Rich issue a series of ironic, searing, yet empathetic poems about cultivated white women with the disadvantages of sex but the advantages of class and race. A tart observation, "No room for nostalgia here," opens "Turning the Wheel," an extraordinary 1981 sequence in which Rich returns to a desert landscape. (WP 52-59) The wheel belongs to both a modern woman driving her car and a Native American woman creating her pottery. The speaker sees a "lesbian archaeologist," studying shards, who asks "… the clay all questions but her own." She imagines, too, a letter that Mary Jane Colter might have written home. Colter, an architect and designer, planned buildings at the Grand Canyon for the Santa Fe Railroad. She both preserved and appropriated Native American culture. Two years later, in "Education of a Novelist," Rich calls across time to another Southern writer, Ellen Glasgow. She condemns Glasgow for not teaching her black nurse, Lizzie Jones, to read, but confesses: … [FD, 317].

Lesbian/feminist politics remain, but Rich's perceptions expand upon them. She thinks, not only of male domination, but of a system of iron patterns of power that wheel and deal and work together. Pornography violently debases and exploits women, but its nauseating "objectification" of women also warns us against slavery—of anyone by anyone.²⁴

Rich now wants, in women, both "difference and identity." Women share the architecture of their bodies, the humiliation and mutilation of those bodies. What "fuses my anger now …," she wrote in 1978, "… is that we were told we were utterly different." (LSS, 310) Yet, as race proves, so obviously, so profoundly, women differ, too. With delicate audacity, Rich pushes at the boundaries of those differences, pushes for the specific, and particular. As she does so, she uncovers, and must enter, still another buried part of herself: her Jewishness, the faith of father, husband, and first woman lover. She circles back to Jerusalem, the original City on the Hill. Sources, perhaps her most fragmented but suggestive book, exhumes that past. Rich affirms her "powerful" and "womanly" choices; a "powerful, womanly lens"—in brief, the domain of the mother.²⁵ However, Sources returns to the domain of the fathers, and to their vulnerability and pain. Arnold Rich, her father, was the outwardly successful, assimilated son of a Jewish shoe merchant from Birmingham, Alabama. Powerful and arrogant patriarch though he was, he also bore "the suffering of the Jew, the alien stamp." (15) Her mother carried the cultural genes of the Christianity that would stamp Jews out.

Then, with immense dignity, Rich writes to Alfred Conrad, the husband who committed suicide. She has had "… a sense of protecting your existence, not using it merely as a theme for poetry or tragic musings." (32) Now, for the first time, she believes he might hear her. "No person," her elegy ends, "should have to be so alone.…" (33) She has passed through the moral and psychological process that some of her most magnificent poems—"The Phenomenology of Anger," "Integrity"—envision: that between wildness and patience, rage and pitying compassion, fire and water and tears. She has completed the hardest of swings between "Anger and tenderness: my selves." (WP, 9)²⁶

That fusion of the moral and the psychological, the ethical and the emotional, marks Rich. Her writing inflects a stable vocabulary of the good that flows, as feminism itself does, from principles of the Enlightenment, radical democracy, and a redemptive domesticity: freedom; choice; truth; a lucidity as clear as water pouring over rocks; gentleness, an active charity, swabbing "the crusted stump." (DCL, 63) The last of Twenty-One Love Poems asserts … [DCL, 36].

As insistently, Rich's writing asks how to reconcile the claims of autonomy (being free, having will) and the claims of connection (being together, having unity). Connections fuse within the self, between lover and beloved, with others. "Sometimes I feel," she wrote in 1982, "I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, feminist, exmatriate Southerner, split at the root."²⁷ She longs, then, for wholeness, for touch, a desire the hand signifies. The hand. It holds the pen, clasps the child, finds the lover, sews the quilt, cleans the pot, dusts the house. For Rich, hands hammer nails, empty kettles, catch babies leaping from the womb, work vacuum aspirators, stroke "sweated temples" (both body and sanctuary), steer boats. (WP, 9) The hand also knots in anger, smashes in pain. As palms are the canvas of our life-lines, so the figure of the hand backs Rich's vision.

Before the 1960s, her lesbian/feminism was, if not inconceivable, unspeakable. Yet, if her ideas are contemporary, her sense of the poet is not. For Rich refuses to sever poetry from prophecy, those morally driven, passionately uttered visions of things unseen and foreseen, and poetry from witnessing, those morally driven, passionately uttered insights into actions seen. What she said of Dickinson she might have said of herself:

"Poetic language … is a concretization of the poetry of the world at large, the self, and the forces within the self … there is a more ancient concept of the poet (as well) … 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." (LSS, 181)²⁸ She is painfully aware that she cannot control what might happen to her words after she chooses them, but she is accountable for that choice, and for her accuracy.

Rich's lesbian/feminism helps to sculpt her role as prophet and witness. Because patriarchal culture has been silent about lesbians and "all women who are not defined by the men in their lives,"²⁹ the prophet/witness must give speech to experience for the first time. This is one meaning of writing a whole new poetry. However, patriarchal culture has not been consistently silent. Sometimes, it has lied about lesbians. The prophet/witness must then speak truth to, and about, power. At other times, patriarchal culture has distorted or trivialized lesbians. The prophet/witness must then use and affirm "… a vocabulary that has been used negatively and pejoratively."³⁰ She must transvalue language.

Necessarily, the prophet/witness is a performer. She demands an audience, primarily of women. However, the ideology of lesbian/feminism is suspicious of star turns. Rich herself writes in "Transcendental Etude" … [DCL, 74].

The performing Rich—unlike Walt Whitman or Jeremiah—has more stamina than flash; more intensity than ebullience. She is a laser rather than an explosion of fireworks. She will speak, but in "North American Time," a grim, colloquial meditation on the poet's responsibility, she says, self-deprecatingly … [FD, 327].

She will also speak, if possible, to an audience of many women. She is allusive and intricate, but rarely elusive and snobby. In part, she has the clarity of classical poetry. In part, she has the clarity of one who wishes to be heard.³¹

But what language will she speak? Clearly, Rich believes in the power of language to represent ideas, feelings, and events. Although she writes about film and photography, she is no postmodern celebrant of the visual media. She fears that mass TV induces passivity, atrophies the literacy and language we need to "take on the most complex, subtle, and drastic re-evaluation ever attempted of the condition of the species." (LSS, 12) Her dream of a common language is of words, a shared cultural frame and thread, communal and quotidian, "hewn of the commonest living subtance" as well as "violent, arcane." (PSN, 232)

Yet, the lesbian/feminist poet cannot accept language that smoothly. What is she to do with the fact that the powerful have used language to choke and to erase her? To mystify and to disguise? Some French theoreticians of écriture féminine advocate stealing, and then, flying away with the oppressor's speech. That theft and that escape are acts of re-appropriation and control. Certainly, in her references to male poets—yes, even to Robert Lowell, Rich shows her authority.³² More fervently, Rich selects female experience—the body; mothers, daughters, and granddaughters; lesbianism; women's history—as her subject. Men, too, have written such experiences up and down, but men, because they are men, have been false prophets, narcissistic and perjuring witnesses.

Sadly, that selection offers little ease. For what is Rich, who believes in poetry, to do with the fact that lesbian/feminism has naturalized female experience? That lesbian/feminism has rooted female experience less in language than in things, objects, inarticulate but pregnant silences? Rich's poetry itself shows how craftily she handles the issue. First, she reduces the physical presence of language on the page. She wipes away diacritical marks, the busyness of syntax. Then, she alternates words with blank spaces—for breathing, for gazing. As she pushes language towards silence, she does to the verbal image what Nathalie Sarraute (or, in her way, Jane Austen) does to narrative. Yet, she refuses silence. She has words, and doubts-in-words.

Read "The Images." (WP, 3-5) The poem is a series of six sections, each an irregular series of staggered three-or four-line sections. The eye cautions the reader against regularities, sonorities. Two women are in bed. In the "pain of the city," the speaker turns. Her hand touches her lover "before language names in the brain." The speaker chooses touch, but not this city, where both images of women, and the looks of men, string women out and crucify them.

The speaker then recognizes that she has romanticized language, music, art, "frescoes translating / violence into patterns so powerful and pure / we continually fail to ask are they true for us." In contrast, when she now walks among "time-battered stones," she can think of her lover. She has gone to the sea, among flowering weeds, and drawn a flower. She has been "mute / innocent of grammar as the waves." There, feeling "free," she has had a vision of a woman's face and body. Her breasts gaze at the poet; the poet at her world. Rich writes … ["The Images," WP, 3-5].

"Free of speech" is, of course, a syntactical pun. For the speaker is both free from speech, and, now, free to speak. She comes home, "starving / for images," a body in need of culture. She and her lover, as they remember each other in sleep, will "reassemble re-collect re-member" the lost images of women in the past. They will do the work of Isis, but for Isis, not Osiris. As the culture's images seek to "dismember" them, they will fight the war of the images.

The poem's last lines then recall the picture that the speaker has drawn: a thorn-leaf guarding a purple-tongued flower. Perhaps the picture represents only a flower on a beach. Perhaps not, too. For the thorn leaf can signify the lovers' vigilance in protecting the purple-tongued flower of the vulva, of their sexuality, and of their speech. The thorn is the anger that guards their tenderness, and their poetry.

Language lies. Language invents. Poetry lies. Poetry invents. Rich accepts that "truth." Writing tells stories that matter. Writing gives us images from the mind and of the body, for the relief of the body and the reconstruction of the mind. Rich accepts that "truth" as well. If some words ("lesbian") constrict the throat, say them. Open them up. Only then can we speak enough to wonder seriously if language lies, because it is language; if language invents, because it is language, or if language lies because people are liars who invent to control, rather than to dream. and justly please.

Notes

1. Adrienne Rich, "It Is the Lesbian in Us …," On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, hereafter LSS, (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1979), p. 201.
2. Helen Vendler, "Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds," Adrienne Rich's Poetry, ed. Barbara Charles-worth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi, hereafter ARP, (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Norton Critical Edition, 1975), p. 160. Vendler's essay was originally published in Parnassus, II, 1 (Fall/Winter 1973). As Marjorie Perloff has pointed out to me in conversation, Rich is the only living poet who is the subject of a Norton critical anthology.
3. In 1975, when ARP appeared, Rich also published Poems Selected and New, 1950-1974, hereafter PSN, (New York: W. W. Norton and Co.). Mark that the first poem is "Storm Warnings", the last "From an Old House in America," which ends, "Any woman's death diminishes me."
4. Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977, hereafter DCL (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1978), p. 76.
5. Writing Like a Woman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), p. 121.
6. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Writing beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 138-9, expresses this position most sympathetically, in an elegant exegesis of Rich, which discusses the poetics of her lesbian/feminism.
7. Marjorie Perloff, "Private Lives/Public Images," Michigan Quarterly Review, 22 (January 1983), 132. My essay, "Curing: Some Comments on the Women's Movement and the Avant-Garde," compares Stein and Rich. Manuscript read at the University of Houston, March, 1985, and at the University of California/Irvine, May, 1985, forthcoming in a collection of essays about the avant-garde, edited by Sandy Friedan and Richard Spuler, Munich: Fink (sic).
8. Adrienne Rich, "'Comment' on Susan Stanford Friedman," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 9, 4 (Summer 1984), 737. Friedman's article, "'I go where I love': An Intertextual Study of H. D. and Adrienne Rich," appeared in Signs, 9, 2 (Winter 1983), 228-245. Elly Bulkin, "'Kissing/Against the Light': A Look at Lesbian Poetry," Lesbian Studies: Present and Future, ed. Margaret Cruikshank (Old Westbury, New York: Feminist Press, 1982), 32-54, is a solid survey. For analyses of other genres, see Bonnie Zimmerman, "The Politics of Transliteration: Lesbian Personal Narratives," Signs, 9, 4 (Summer 1984), 663-682, and my "Zero Degree Deviancy: The Lesbian Novel in English," Critical Inquiry, Special Issue, "Writing and Sexual Difference," ed. Elizabeth Abel, 8, 2 (Winter 1981), 363-379.
9. See, too, Bulkin, 45-46.
10. Marilyn R. Farwell, "Adrienne Rich and Organic Feminist Criticism," College English, 39, 2 (October 1977), 191-203, analyzes Rich's literary criticism.
11. I have adapted this idea from one of the most competent studies of Rich, her development, and relationship to Anne Bradstreet and Emily Dickinson as Puritan American women writers: Wendy Martin, An American Triptych (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), p. 5.
12. Ostriker, Writing Like A Woman, p. 102.
13. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, hereafter OWB (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1976), p. 219.
14. Rich writes of this most fully in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," hereafter CH, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 5, 4 (Summer 1980), 631-660. The founding editor of Signs, I had asked Rich, over a white tablecloth at lunch in a Chinese restaurant on the Upper West Side of New York City, if she would be generous enough to contribute. I respected, and feared, her intellectual purity. I hoped she would not find me an academic muddle. Yes, she said, she had an article, about heterosexuality and lesbianism. The essay was one of the most famous Signs published. For extended comment, read "View-point," by Ann Ferguson, Jacquelyn N. Zita, and Kathryn Pyne Addelson, Signs, 7, 1 (Autumn 1981), 158-199.
15. "Like This Together," The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984, hereafter FD (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1984), pp. 62-63.
16. "This Woman's Movement," ARP, p. 202.
17. Martin, p. 211.
18. Alice Echols, "The New Feminism of Yin and Yang," Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), pp. 439-459, gives an informed, if not throbbingly sympathetic, account of 1970s cultural feminism. She has published a version in "The Taming of the Id: Feminist Sexual Politics, 1968-1983," Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), pp. 50-72. Together, the books represent new directions in the feminist debate about female sexuality in the 1980s, largely toward a theory of female sexuality as a source of pleasure, fantasy, delight. Elizabeth Wilson, "Forbidden Love," Feminist Studies, 10, 2 (Summer 1984), 213-226, is an intriguing English parallel.
19. "For Ethel Rosenberg," A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, hereafter WP (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1981), p. 29.
20. Perloff, 136, for one.
21. Martin, p. 9.
22. "Split at the Root," Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology, ed. Evelyn Torton Beck (Watertown: Persephone Press, 1982), p. 81. Rich notes the extent of her debt to her friendship with Audre Lorde and her life with Michelle Cliff for her understanding of racism, and of "passing."
23. "Response," Sinister Wisdom 14 (Summer 1980), 104-05. Rich thanks Elly Bulkin, who helped open a public debate in lesbian/feminism about racism and Mary Daly's work.
24. Adrienne Rich, "Afterword," Take Back the Night, ed. Laura Lederer (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1980), p. 314.
25. Sources, hereafter S (Woodside, California: The Heyeck Press, 1983).
26. I suggest that Rich has refined a poetics of anger and tenderness in a line that begins with the two stresses of the spondee, or, occasionally, a trochee, and then relaxes into her controlled, but flexible, iambic feet. Look at the phrase "Anger and tenderness" itself.
27. "Split at the Root," p. 83. Rich's work is evidence for Alicia Ostriker's typology of women's poetry: "… the quest for autonomous self-definition; the intimate treatment of the body; the release of anger; and … for want of a better name, the contact imperative." The latter craves unity, mutuality, continuity, connection, touch. "The Nerves of a Midwife: Contemporary American Women's Poetry," Parnassus, 6, 1 (Fall/Winter 1977), 73, 82-83.
28. Albert Gelpi, "Adrienne Rich: The Poetics of Change," ARP, p. 148, persuasively casts Rich as prophet and scapegoat.
29. "Three Conversations," ARP, p. 112.
30. "An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich," in Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1984), p. 112.
31. Several critics comment on Rich's clarity, e.g. Martin, p. 169; Suzanne Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms, Modern American Poetry by Women: A New Tradition (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1976), pp. 178-180, 202. In her memoir of Rich as teacher, a sort of performance, Joyce Greenberg says: "… there was nothing of the actress, nothing of the performer about her." "By Woman Taught," Parnassus, 7, 2 (Spring/Summer 1979), 91.
32. Joanne Feit Diehl, "'Cartographies of Silence': Rich's Common Language and the Woman Writer," Feminist Studies, 6, 3 (Fall 1980), 545, confronts the issue of Lowell and Rich. My comments about Rich and language owe much to this essay.

ERICA JONG (REVIEW DATE JULY 1973)

SOURCE : Jong, Erica. “Visionary Anger.” Ms. 2, no. 1 (July 1973): 30-4.

In the following review, Jong outlines the feminist concerns of Diving into the Wreck, highlighting such themes as the patriarchy, femininity, and androgyny.

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. . . . Is there any other way?”

—Emily Dickinson

The test of a good book of poetry for me is that it makes me want to write. It reawakens that part of myself which poems come from; it makes my pen itch to be on the paper; it warms me, chills me, and fills my head with first lines.

This is not surprising, because that-place-which-poems-come-from is shared by all poets, all people. It is not the exclusive property of one individual. Call it the muse, or call it the collective unconscious, it is our shared source—though each poet taps it somewhat differently. And it is a place beyond ego, beyond the narrow distinctions of yours and mine. A good book of poetry makes me want to write again because it reestablishes my connection with that source. It strips away the petty obstacles which the cowardly superego imposes (the fear of self-exposure, the worry about what the family will think, the terror of criticism) and it puts me in touch with that deeper part of myself which speaks boldly because it is not speaking only for my self.

Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck is a good book in that most fundamental sense. By “good” I mean “alive.” Emily Dickinson once asked whether her poems “lived”; she did not ask whether they were “good.” And “alive” or “dead” still seems a far more pertinent criterion than “good” or “bad.” This book lives. I have put my ear to its chest; I have felt its moist breath on my neck; I have heard the beating wings of the muse nearby.

Diving into the Wreck is Adrienne Rich’s seventh collection and probably her best. I say “probably” because each of her books (starting with the first Yale Younger Poets Award volume) has been so accomplished and probing in its own way that ranking them seems silly. Her first book, A Change of World (1951), was very much of its world. It was full of perfectly crafted poems which speculated on the relationship between life and art (as accomplished, craft-conscious poets did in those days). And yet even then, she was original and piercing in a way most of her contemporaries were not. There was a striking honesty about her poems and a willingness to deal with disillusion and disappointment that was rare for so young a poet.

In her second book, there appeared a poem which I loved when I was in college and still love now. It was called “Living in Sin, ” and it was a perfect blend of irony and grimness. It also pointed the way toward the deeper exploration of women which has characterized Adrienne Rich’s recent work. [. . . “Living in Sin, ” from The Diamond Cutters ].

A remarkable poem to have written at any time, but especially remarkable for the mid-fifties. I quote it not only to show how powerful Adrienne Rich’s writing was from the beginning, but also to demonstrate that this poet was “contending with a woman’s demons” long before it became fashionable to do so. Like all good poets, she was prophetic because she was in touch with her own feelings.

The line of development from “Living in Sin ” to Diving into the Wreck is a serpentine line, yet there has never been any question where Adrienne Rich is going. Along the way, there have been great numbers of extraordinary poems that never flinched from dealing with sexuality, hunger, motherhood, loneliness, blood and revolution in both the personal and the public senses. If you read Diving into the Wreck and then go back and consider the books before it (A Change of World, The Diamond Cutters, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, Necessities of Life, Leaflets , and The Will To Change ), I think you will see that one of Adrienne Rich’s most recurrent themes has always been the relationship between poetry and patriarchy.

Poetry and patriarchy. The problems of woman in a patriarchal society. That is, in part, what Diving into the Wreck is about. Yet it is not about patriarchy in a narrowly political sense. Rich is one of very few poets who can deal with political issues in her poems without letting them degenerate into social realism, because her notion of politics is not superficial; it is essentially psychological and organic. We all give lip-service to this concept of politics, yet few of us truly understand it. We all claim to believe that political oppression and personal feelings are related, and yet a great deal of the self-consciously polemical poetry that has come out of the Women’s Movement reads like a generalized rant and it lacks any sort of psychological grounding. The poet has not really looked into herself and told it true. She has been content to echo simplistic slogans.

Adrienne Rich’s concept of patriarchy has nothing simplistic about it. Her feminism is a natural extension of her poetry because, for her, feminism means empathy. And empathy is the essential tool of the poet. It is akin to the quality Keats called “negative capability”—that unique gift for projecting oneself into other states of consciousness. If Rich sees the role of the poet and the role of the revolutionary as totally compatible, it is because she understands that the most profound revolutions will come from the development of our capacity for empathy.

In a brilliant essay entitled “The Anti-Feminist Woman, ” (The New York Review of Books, November 30, 1972), she summed this up in these words:

I believe that feminism must imply an imaginative identification with all women (and with the ghostly woman in all men) and that the feminist must, because she can, extend this act of the imagination as far as possible.

The phrase “the ghostly woman in all men” is crucial. Rich is alarmed not only by the outward signs of discrimination against women in our patriarchal culture, but also by the way this culture suppresses the nurturant qualities in men, in children, and in societal institutions. She is a feminist because she feels “endangered, psychically and physically, by this society, and because [she believes] we have come to an edge of history when men—insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea—have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included.” Her feminism is far more radical and far-reaching than equal-pay-for-equal-work or the establishment of fifty-fifty marriages. It envisions a world in which empathy, mothering, “a concern for the quality of life,” “a connection with the natural and the extrasensory order” will not be relegated to women (who then have no power to implement these concerns on a practical level), but will be encouraged in the society at large.

So she is not talking only about discrimination against women, but about discrimination against the feminine.

(By the feminine I mean the nurturant qualities in all people—whatever their sex. I realize that the term is unsatisfactory and reflects the sexism of our language. The real nature of the feminine and the masculine can never be ascertained until we have a truly equitable social order. Adrienne Rich, however, does seem to be convinced that the feminine principle is more nurturant and the masculine more competitive. I think she might also agree that this need not always be so. But her main point seems to be that after too many centuries of uncontested phallic power, we need to right the balance. Women may have to take over for a while to save men from their own self-destructiveness. Eventually, though, Rich would probably hope for a world in which gentle, strong men and gentle, strong women could work together in harmony.)

Her poems reflect this concern with the feminine. But since they are poems, not tracts, they reflect it in a subtle way. The first poem in the book, “Trying To Talk With A Man, ” establishes the theme of destructive masculine power versus the “underground river” which women have represented in our desert of a culture. . . . [“Trying to Talk With A Man,” Diving into the Wreck ].

The imagery of bombs, testings, laceration, and thirst evokes the landscape of emergency in which we all live. The “dull green succulents” and the “underground river” are opposed to the “condemned scenery,” the “ghost town,” and the “dry heat” of masculine power. The woman speaker feels more helpless with the man than without him; her nurturant and intellectual power “forcing its way between deformed cliffs,” is less pervasive than the man’s—though for both of them, it is the only chance for redemption. The time is now. The “condemned scenery” is our culture. The question at the end of the poem is whether we will survive the test, whether we will realize soon enough that the danger lies in ourselves, in our own mistaken priorities.

Again and again the dead end of male civilization is dramatized in these poems . . . [see poems in Diving into the Wreck ].

But the poems are not only about dead ends. They are about loneliness and the various forms it takes: the loneliness of being a woman in a male-dominated culture, the loneliness of being a life-giver in a world that is in love with death, the loneliness of being on artist, an outsider, a survivor. Human loneliness is one of the great themes in all the arts, and Adrienne Rich depicts it more intensely here than in any other recent book I know. But she also shows that loneliness can be the beginning of rebirth. The woman, because she stands outside the death-dealing culture and its power games, can be a visionary who points the way to redemption. And these poems are also very much about redemption: about sister giving birth to sister, and woman giving birth to herself. For instance, in “The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen As One ” . . . [see “The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen As One ”].

The speaker of this book is a survivor. She has all the pain of the survivor, but she also has the survivor’s unique vision. The subterranean life of the book, which flows through its images, is full of scars, faults, stains, deserts, leaking blood rotting logs, ruined cities, and wrecked ships. The survivor-poet dives into this wreckage and tries to salvage meaning and a new life. She must give birth to herself and to her sisters, and she must also try to save man from himself—though she spends her own life energy endlessly in trying: “The waste of my love goes on this way / trying to save you from yourself.”

If I’ve made this sound as though the speaker of these poems is a sort of Wonder Woman determined to rescue the world by heroic feats, then I’ve misled you. Rich does imply that women are strong and must learn to be even stronger (which is one of the glorious things about her book— especially after reading all those so-called feminist novels in which women are depicted as helpless victims); but the speaker of these poems need not be seen exclusively as a woman, even as a Wonder Woman. She could be any outsider, any person who is alienated from our destructive culture, any life-giver (female or male) who wishes to raise a voice against death-worship and the waste of love.

In fact, some of the most interesting poems in the book are those in which Rich imagines an androgynous creature who transcends conventional maleness and conventional femaleness and walks through the city like a stranger—my visionary anger cleansing my sight / and the detailed perceptions of mercy / flowering from that anger . . . [“The Stranger ”].

In “Diving into the Wreck, ” the title poem, it is the androgyne who dives into the wreck to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail . . . [“Diving into the Wreck, ”].

This stranger-poet-survivor carries “a book of myths” in which her/his “names do not appear.” These are the old myths of patriarchy, the myths that split male and female irreconcilably into two warring factions, the myths that perpetuate the battle between the sexes. Implicit in Rich’s image of the androgyne is the idea that we must write new myths, create new definitions of humanity which will not glorify this angry chasm but heal it. Rich’s visionary androgyne reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s assertion that the great artist must be mentally bisexual. But Rich takes this idea even further: it is not only the artist who must make the emphatic leap beyond gender, but any of us who would try to save the world from destruction.

Though it is extremely important, the androgynous vision is not unique to Rich. However, if you read closely and follow the patterns of metaphors in these poems, you will find another fascinating cluster: those of fire and burning. The speaker of the poems describes herself at one point as “wood with a gift for burning”; and women are often described in terms of fire imagery. Matchsticks, glowing coals, and blazing wood leap through the pages of this book. The survivor-poet burns, yet her burning leaves her unconsumed. The poet as sacred flame—one might almost say. The poet as hearthkeeper. The visionary who lights the dark world by her own burning. Her burning, however, is never a destructive burning, never a vengeful self-immolation. There is nothing of the widow jumping on the funeral pyre here, and nothing like Sylvia Plath’s obsession with suicide almost for its own sake. This burning is an affirmation. The fire is a temple- or a hearth-fire. It might even be the sacred flame at Delphi which women guarded.

If you follow the fire imagery still more speculatively and try to see the old myths with an un-jaundiced eye, you may even conclude that Adrienne Rich’s survivor-poet is a kind of Prometheus. I was, in particular, reminded of a passage in Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents which has always intrigued me. In it, Freud is ruminating on the origin of fire and its eventual domestication. Of course he never stops to consider that Prometheus may have been a woman, but had he fewer patriarchal prejudices, his own evidence might have led him to that conclusion:

It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire, of satisfying an infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upward. Putting out fire by micturating—a theme to which modern giants, Gulliver in Lilliput and Rabelais’ Gargantua, still hark back— was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person [nota bene] to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him [sic] and subdue it to his [sic] own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his [sic] renunciation of instinct. Further, it is as though woman had been appointed guardian of the fire which was held captive on the domestic hearth, because her anatomy made it impossible for her to yield to the temptation of this desire.

The first person to renounce this self-indulgence would have been the domesticator of fire, and Freud automatically assumes it to have been a man—who then gave it to a woman to guard. But the logical conclusion of his own evidence is a bit different. Women, who are not interested in things like competing with each other to piss out fires, would more likely have been the tamers of fire. Far from being the passive receptors of a force tamed by men, women were probably the fire-givers and later, its guardians. Ergo: Prometheus was a woman.

So twisted are our myths that it will take generations of new scholars to begin to untangle them. But the exploration has begun. Adrienne Rich’s poems are not just a dirge for a dead order but a celebration of a new age of discovery. No review can hope to do justice to the richness and variety of Diving into the Wreck . Every poem in the book matters. Read them.

Further Reading

Criticism

Bere, Carol. “The Road Taken: Adrienne Rich in the 1990s.” Literary Review 43, no. 4 (summer 2000): 550-61.

Provides a thematic overview of Rich’s poetry published during the 1990s.

Dickie, Margaret. Stein, Bishop, and Rich: Lyrics of Love, War, and Place. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997, 234 p.

Critical analysis of Rich’s poetry.

Eagleton, Mary. “Adrienne Rich, Location, and the Body.”¹Journal of Gender Studies 9, no. 3 (November 2000): 299-312.

Examination of the theoretical significance of “Notes toward a Politics of Location” in relation to Rich’s poetry, illustrating how the essay situates Rich’s physical body as both a personal and a public location of white female Jewish subjectivity.

Flynn, Gale. “The Radicalization of Adrienne Rich.” Hollins Critic 11, no. 4 (October 1974): 1-15.

Traces the evolution of Rich’s feminist ideology throughout her life and career.

Henneberg, Sylvia. “‘The Slow Turn of Consciousness’: Adrienne Rich’s Family Plot.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 27, no. 4 (1998): 347-58.

Explores Rich’s treatment of family in her work.

Morris, Adelaide. “‘Saving the Skein’: The Structure of Diving into the Wreck.” Contemporary Poetry 3, no. 2 (summer 1978): 43-61.

Analyzes the formal and thematic structure of Diving into the Wreck.

Ostriker, Alicia. “Her Cargo: Adrienne Rich and the Common Language.” The American Poetry Review 8, no. 4 (July-August 1979): 6-10.

Examines the feminist poetics of The Dream of a Common Language.

Rupp, Leila J. “Women’s History in the New Millennium: Adrienne Rich’s ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience’: A Retrospective.” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 3 (autumn 2003): 7-89.

Reviews Rich’s work in relation to feminist literary theory.

Criticism

Bere, Carol. "The Road Taken: Adrienne Rich in the 1990s." Literary Review 43, no. 4 (summer 2000): 550-61.

Provides a thematic overview of Rich's poetry published during the 1990s.

Dickie, Margaret. Stein, Bishop, and Rich: Lyrics of Love, War, and Place. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1997, 234 p.

Critical analysis of Rich's poetry.

Eagleton, Mary. "Adrienne Rich, Location, and the Body."¹Journal of Gender Studies 9, no. 3 (November 2000): 299-312.

Examination of the theoretical significance of "Notes toward a Politics of Location" in relation to Rich's poetry, illustrating how the essay situates Rich's physical body as both a personal and a public location of white female Jewish subjectivity.

Flynn, Gale. "The Radicalization of Adrienne Rich." Hollins Critic 11, no. 4 (October 1974): 1-15.

Traces the evolution of Rich's feminist ideology throughout her life and career.

Henneberg, Sylvia. "'The Slow Turn of Consciousness': Adrienne Rich's Family Plot." Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 27, no. 4 (1998): 347-58.

Explores Rich's treatment of family in her work.

Morris, Adelaide. "'Saving the Skein': The Structure of Diving into the Wreck." Contemporary Poetry 3, no. 2 (summer 1978): 43-61.

Analyzes the formal and thematic structure of Diving into the Wreck.

Ostriker, Alicia. "Her Cargo: Adrienne Rich and the Common Language." The American Poetry Review 8, no. 4 (July-August 1979): 6-10.

Examines the feminist poetics of The Dream of a Common Language.

Rupp, Leila J. "Women's History in the New Millennium: Adrienne Rich's 'Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience': A Retrospective." Journal of Women's History 15, no. 3 (autumn 2003): 7-89.

Reviews Rich's work in relation to feminist literary theory.

Templeton, Alice. The Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne Rich's Feminist Poetics, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995, 193 p.

Discusses the mutual influence of contemporary feminism and Rich's poetics upon each other.

Van Dyne, Susan R. "The Mirrored Vision of Adrienne Rich." Modern Poetry Studies 8, no. 1 (spring 1977): 140-73.

Examines the evolving relationship between the personae and the politics of Rich's poetry.

Yorke, Liz. Adrienne Rich: Passion, Politics, and the Body. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1998, 176 p.

Surveys Rich's feminist prose writings.

OTHER SOURCES FROM GALE:

Additional coverage of Rich's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: American Writers Retrospective Supplement, Vol. 2; American Writers Supplement, Vol. 1; Concise Dictionary of American Literary Biography Supplement; Contemporary Authors, Vols. 9-12R; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 20, 53, 74; Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vols. 3, 6, 7, 11, 18, 36, 73, 76, 125; Contemporary Poets, Ed. 7; Contemporary Southern Writers; Contemporary Women Poets; Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vols. 5, 67; DISCovering Authors Modules: Poets; DISCovering Authors 3.0; Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Ed. 3; Exploring Poetry; Feminist Writers; Literature Resource Center; Major 20th-Century Writers, Ed. 1, 2; Modern American Women Writers; Poetry Criticism, Vol. 5; Poetry for Students, Vol. 15; Poets: American and British; Reference Guide to American Literature, Ed. 4; and World Poets.