Adrienne Rich (1929-2012) was an American poet, essayist, and feminist, called one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century.
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Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I’m Jenny Kaplan and this is Encyclopedia Womannica.
Today we’re talking about one of the most widely taught, widely read and widely praised poets of the twentieth century. Her work brought the minutiae of women’s lives into the spotlight, challenging the idea that to write from the female perspective was uninspired and undeserving of attention.
Let’s talk about Adrienne Rich.
When she was born -- in Baltimore, in 1929 -- Adrienne Rich’s parents thought she would be a boy. They’d planned to name her after her father, Arnold, a doctor. Instead, Arnold decided his daughter, Adrienne, would be a literary prodigy.
By the age of four, Adrienne could read and write. By six, she wrote her first poetry book. By seven, a fifty-page play about the Trojan War.
“This is the child we needed and deserved,” her mother, Helen, wrote in a notebook.
Helen had been a concert pianist, and had given up her career for marriage and motherhood. As much as Adrienne’s childhood was marked by long hours in her father’s library, it was her mother’s sadness, and lack of agency, left a lasting impression, too.
In 1951, while a senior at Radcliffe College, Adrienne experienced her first big break. Her poetry manuscript, ‘A Change of World,’ won the Yale Younger Poets Prize The prize came with a publishing contract. W.H. Auden wrote the forward. Reviewers loved it. At 22 years old, Adrienne became a critical darling.
She soon won a Guggenheim fellowship, which funded additional studies at Oxford. There, she met Alfred Conrad, a graduate student from Harvard.
Despite her father’s disapproval, Adrienne married Alfred in 1953.
By the time Adrienne was 30, she was the mother of three young boys. The family moved around, following Alfred from teaching job to teaching job. Adrienne’s days were spent with household chores, laundry,cooking and cleaning, with little time for poetry. She felt increasingly separated from the prodigy she’d once been. Years later, she’d write that this period of her life felt like sleepwalking.
In the first nine years of her marriage, Adrienne only published one book, “The Diamond Cutters.”
But in 1963, came her third collection: Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. And in the title poem, Adrienne found the creative footing that would carry her through the rest of her career.
The piece opens with housework. With a woman doing dishes, her mother-in-law nearby. But Adrienne finds metaphor and meaning in the mundane life of these two women. She proves that it’s an arena deserving of art, a place to be both explored -- and transcended. The poem reads --
You, once a belle in Shreveport,
with henna-colored hair, skin like a peachbud,
still have your dresses copied from that time...
Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake,
heavy with useless experience, rich
with suspicion, rumor, fantasy,
crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge
of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
Nervy, glowering, your daughter
wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.
Later, Adrienne wrote that motherhood radicalized her.
In 1973, Adrienne published what would come to be regarded as her masterwork, the poetry collection Diving Into the Wreck. The collection won the National Book Award, but Adrienne refused to accept it alone. Instead, she invited fellow nominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walker to collectively receive the award, on behalf of all women.
In 1976, Adrienne officially came out as a lesbian with the poetry collection, Twenty-One Love Poems. The subject? Queer love. That year, she moved in with her partner, Michelle Cliff. They would remain together until Adrienne’s death over 30 years later.
Adrienne would ultimately publish 24 collections of poetry, and over half a dozen books of essays and prose. She explored identity politics before the discipline had a name. She wrote about the violent whiteness of the feminist movement, of racism, anti-Blackness, and of the male hegemony. She wrote about the lasting effects of the Holocaust, of reclaiming her Judiasm. And she wrote about the burden of traditional femininity and the institution of motherhood.
In 1997, she refused the National Medal of Arts, the highest artistic honor awarded by the U.S. government. In a letter, she wrote that she couldn’t understand how, amid “the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic justice,” the country chose to honor “a few token artists while the people at large are so dishonored…Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.”
Adrienne died in 2012, from complications with rheumatoid arthritis. In a 1984 speech, she summed up her lifelong fight in seven words: “The creation of a society without domination.”
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