With the new left party, she participated in anti-war demonstrations, the movement for civil rights. This was an important event in her professional life, through which she met African American poets Alice Walker and Audrey Lord, who also taught at the college.
Rich met her future husband, Alfred Haskell Conrad when she was an undergraduate student. At the time, Conrad worked at Harvard University, where he was an economics professor.
Norton, Midnight Salvage: Poems — W. Norton, Collected Early Poems: — W. Norton, Poems: Selected and New — W. Norton, Diving into the Wreck: Poems — W. Norton, Leaflets W. Norton, Necessities of Life: Poems — W. National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers.
Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. Poets Search more than 3, biographies of contemporary and classic poets. She died a famous woman denying her wounds denying her wounds came from the same source as her power. Rich also began re-visioning her literary predecessors, women writers who had beaten the odds and succeeded in their art, though they rarely received sufficient critical attention.
This practice provided Rich with continuity, even as she changed dramatically. Instead, she treated them like fossils: things to recover, preserve, study.
Change was not an accident or a twist of fate but something you achieved, deliberately. Throughout the biography, Holladay marvels, not always with admiration, at how swiftly and confidently Rich could complete an about-face.
At times, she suggests that Rich was inconsistent, or, worse, disloyal. She was thoughtful, considerate, cautious in word and deed. Never a mad genius, like Lowell or Ginsberg or Plath, Rich became, in the public imagination, something else: the angry feminist, eager to lay waste to people or systems she deplored. By the mid-eighties, she was much honored—a professor at Stanford, the winner of multiple awards—but not entirely adored. The critic Helen Vendler, who had once felt a kinship with Rich, watched her evolution with dismay.
She deliberately made herself ugly and wrote those extreme and ridiculous poems. But poetry had always been urgent to Rich; it was this sense of urgency that had propelled her to write every day in college, and to stay up working as a young mother. Calling her inconsistent is like faulting the train for leaving one town and arriving in another.
She could also take herself extremely seriously. Willing not only to admit fault but also to accuse herself of it unprompted, Rich became a kind of closed system—hard for critics and even friends to penetrate. I arrived late, and from my place standing at the back of the audience I could just barely make out a short woman with close-cropped hair, dressed all in black, sitting in a high-backed chair.
She looked frail, like a wounded bird, but when she spoke it was with such force that I felt the need to step back. The crowd—mostly women, of all ages—was hushed; it was as if we had come together in mourning, or in church. When the event ended, some rushed toward Rich, asking for her signature, but I felt the need to be alone. I walked home through Radcliffe Yard, travelling the same paths Rich had walked as an undergraduate, more than fifty years earlier. She had left, turned her back on the place—but she had also returned, uncompromising.
She had told the crowd that, despite rumors to the contrary, she was still alive, and still writing. In the early s, with groundbreaking volumes such as The Will to Change and Diving into the Wreck , Rich transformed herself into a poet whom Auden would barely have recognised, trumpeting her lesbian feminist ideals and charged with a left-wing conviction that still burns brightly.
Through her essays, articles and lectures, Rich has also contributed to the feminist debate. Of Woman Born , is still one of feminism's most sensitive appraisals of motherhood: "All human life on the planet is born of woman," she writes. Yet there has been a strange lack of material to help us understand and use it. Her latest book, Arts of the Possible , bringing together writings from the last three decades, has just been released in paperback.
Some - predominantly male - critics have considered Rich's politics over- bearing: "This book is absolute radical witchery," wrote Alexander Theroux about Of Woman Born , "less a feminist manifesto than the Confessions of St Adrienne. A hodgepodge of 10 aggrieved essays, its stridency makes me wonder why the author is living in New York rather than in one of the famous matriarchies.
She believes in creativity. She is passionate about justice. Harold Bloom has called her 'strident', and much as I love him, he's wrong. Poets should not be cuddly. In person, Rich is bright, engaging and instantly likeable, with a strain of unassailable independence in her voice. She is now aged 73, and her tiny frame has been twisted by the arthritis she has endured since her early 20s; she moves only with great difficulty using a translucent cane.
After a number of operations she battles constant discomfort. At times she has suffered other difficult and tragic circumstances, not least the separation from her husband in and his subsequent suicide.
Friends say she has always faced hardships with admirable resilience and strength: "She has huge energy," says the poet Jean Valentine. At the same time, Rich's formidable mettle does sometimes produce challenging results: "I feel there is something frankly sexist," she called to say, "about probing my sexual life rather than discussing my work and my ideas. I think that it would not be done to a male poet and thinker.
The same uncompromising rigour and resolution is evident when she focuses on her ideas: "We have to think internationally if we are going to talk about women," she says, claiming that the feminist revolution has only begun. We haven't come such a long way in the larger sense. Any movement has to recognise its successes, but it also has to retain a kind of vibrant dissatisfaction.
Rich lives with her partner, the Jamaican-born novelist Michelle Cliff, in the Californian town of Santa Cruz, on a stretch of Pacific coastline surrounded by palms and guava trees. Despite the tensions and frustrations she experienced as a young mother she is now extremely close to her three sons: David, who designs computer graphics, Paul, an elementary school music teacher, and Jacob, the youngest, a producer of political radio programmes in Los Angeles. She maintains a vigorous regime of writing, readings and teaching, and, friends say, has become more determined and buoyant as infirmity has encroached: "There have been times when I have been very confined to one place," she says.
But you cannot imagine living a life different from the one you have lived. Arnold Rich, a Jew of Austro-Hungarian stock who became a pathologist at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, had rather different ideas for his daughters, and encouraged them to spend as much time as possible exploring the library, which he stocked with Auden, MacNeice and Yeats.
The object of the exercise was to transform Cynthia into a novelist and Adrienne into a poet: "I was supposed to write something every day and show it to him," Adrienne remembers. But it was probably a good thing. And Arnold Rich's overbearing approach left an indelible mark of resentment on Adrienne: "His involvement was egotistical, tyrannical, and terribly wearing," she later claimed.
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