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Legendary American Poet Adrienne Rich Dies at 82
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March 29, 2012
The award-winning poet and essayist Adrienne Rich, who was one of America’s most powerful writers, has died aged 82. Her daughter-in-law Diana Horowitz said Rich died at home in Santa Cruz, California, following complications from the rheumatoid arthritis from which she had suffered for many years.
Described as “one of America's foremost public intellectuals” by the Poetry Foundation, and as “a poet of towering reputation and towering rage [who] brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century” by the New York Times, Rich’s career spanned seven decades, numerous prizes and more than 20 collections of poetry as well as acclaimed essays, articles and lectures.
When she was just 21, WH Auden chose her as winner of the Yale Younger Poets Competition. Auden went on to write a preface for her first collection, A Change of World. “The typical danger for poets in our age is, perhaps, the desire to be ‘original’,” he wrote. “Miss Rich, who is, I understand, 21 years old, displays a modesty not so common with that age, which disclaims any extraordinary vision, and a love for her medium, a determination to ensure that whatever she writes shall, at least, not be shoddily made.”
By the 60s and early 70s, however, with collections such as Diving into the Wreck and Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, Rich was writing radical free verse full of her feminist ideals and leftwing convictions, exploring sexuality and identity, motherhood and politics. Her transformation, said the critic Ruth Whitman in 2002, has been “astonishing to watch ... In one woman the history of women in the 20th century, from careful traditional obedience to cosmic awareness, defying the mode of our time.”
The publication of Twenty-One Love Poems in 1976 in effect marked Rich’s coming out as a lesbian. “The rules break like a thermometer,/ quicksilver spills across the charted systems/ we're out in a country that has no language/ ...whatever we do together is pure invention/ the maps they gave us were out of date/ by years...”, she wrote. Rich separated from her husband, with whom she had three children, in 1970. He was subsequently ruled to have killed himself. She was with her partner, the writer Michelle Cliff, for more than 30 years.
Presented with the National Book Award for Diving into the Wreck, Rich accepted it on behalf of all women. She refused the National Medal of Arts in 1997, however, “because the very meaning of art as I understand it is incompatible with the cynical politics of this [Clinton’s] administration”.
“She sought always in her work to discover the truth about her life, and through that lens to discover the truth about women’s lives and the lives of people who came from marginal or cross-cultures,” the poet DA Powell told Reuters. “Her poetry is something that some people might categorise as poetry of witness. But witness is only one aspect of it. There’s a kind of unsentimental, unselfish lens through which she articulates the simple joys and burdens of living, the journey of finding oneself.”
Judith Pamplin, who worked with Rich at her publisher WW Norton, told the Guardian that the author's poetry and ideas “could change people's lives”. “A wonderful speaker and reader of her own poetry, she was a brilliant poet whose precision in word choice may be unparalleled,” said Pamplin. “Adrienne wrote with a rare and unwavering integrity about social injustice and her influence in this wider sphere cannot be underestimated.”
In 2006, Rich wrote in the Guardian that “poetry has the capacity to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom – that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the ‘free’ market.”
The Guardian, March 29, 2012
Image from The Poetry Foundation under a Creative Commons license.
Described as “one of America's foremost public intellectuals” by the Poetry Foundation, and as “a poet of towering reputation and towering rage [who] brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century” by the New York Times, Rich’s career spanned seven decades, numerous prizes and more than 20 collections of poetry as well as acclaimed essays, articles and lectures.
When she was just 21, WH Auden chose her as winner of the Yale Younger Poets Competition. Auden went on to write a preface for her first collection, A Change of World. “The typical danger for poets in our age is, perhaps, the desire to be ‘original’,” he wrote. “Miss Rich, who is, I understand, 21 years old, displays a modesty not so common with that age, which disclaims any extraordinary vision, and a love for her medium, a determination to ensure that whatever she writes shall, at least, not be shoddily made.”
By the 60s and early 70s, however, with collections such as Diving into the Wreck and Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, Rich was writing radical free verse full of her feminist ideals and leftwing convictions, exploring sexuality and identity, motherhood and politics. Her transformation, said the critic Ruth Whitman in 2002, has been “astonishing to watch ... In one woman the history of women in the 20th century, from careful traditional obedience to cosmic awareness, defying the mode of our time.”
The publication of Twenty-One Love Poems in 1976 in effect marked Rich’s coming out as a lesbian. “The rules break like a thermometer,/ quicksilver spills across the charted systems/ we're out in a country that has no language/ ...whatever we do together is pure invention/ the maps they gave us were out of date/ by years...”, she wrote. Rich separated from her husband, with whom she had three children, in 1970. He was subsequently ruled to have killed himself. She was with her partner, the writer Michelle Cliff, for more than 30 years.
Presented with the National Book Award for Diving into the Wreck, Rich accepted it on behalf of all women. She refused the National Medal of Arts in 1997, however, “because the very meaning of art as I understand it is incompatible with the cynical politics of this [Clinton’s] administration”.
“She sought always in her work to discover the truth about her life, and through that lens to discover the truth about women’s lives and the lives of people who came from marginal or cross-cultures,” the poet DA Powell told Reuters. “Her poetry is something that some people might categorise as poetry of witness. But witness is only one aspect of it. There’s a kind of unsentimental, unselfish lens through which she articulates the simple joys and burdens of living, the journey of finding oneself.”
Judith Pamplin, who worked with Rich at her publisher WW Norton, told the Guardian that the author's poetry and ideas “could change people's lives”. “A wonderful speaker and reader of her own poetry, she was a brilliant poet whose precision in word choice may be unparalleled,” said Pamplin. “Adrienne wrote with a rare and unwavering integrity about social injustice and her influence in this wider sphere cannot be underestimated.”
In 2006, Rich wrote in the Guardian that “poetry has the capacity to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom – that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the ‘free’ market.”
The Guardian, March 29, 2012
Image from The Poetry Foundation under a Creative Commons license.
Source: The Guardian, March 29, 2012
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