A student at Penn writes:

 

For my individual project I have been asked to assess whether the contemporary poetry avant-garde accept and embrace Adrienne Rich as part of their aesthetic, and whether these poets view Rich’s work as important – formally, aesthetically, or poetically – to their movement.  If at all possible, I would greatly appreciate hearing your opinions regarding Rich’s poetry in context of your personal artistic goals and the goals of the larger avant-garde movement. Are there any poems or essays or actions of hers that you particularly respect or disrespect, and why? What did you think about her refusal of the National Medal of the Arts, and how do you view her decision in regards to her concept  of “American” poetry? Does her concept differ with or complement your own? When you have a chance, please let me know  your opinions on these questions. I very much look forward to hearing from you.

 

In the grand scheme of things, Adrienne Rich has always been one of the “good guys” in American poetry, somebody who not only wrote well, but who worked to define the possibilities for audiences that had not previously existed as fully self-acknowledged communities, and who always has positioned her writing within a larger vision of the world & social justice. She is one of the very few poets of her generation who arose within the framework of the School of Quietude whose poetry I actually feel the need to own & on occasion read. She is also the only such person whose essays I also keep nearby.

 

Rich comes out of the Boston Brahmin tradition that we normally associate today with Robert Lowell & his closest associates – Randall Jarrell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, George Starbuck, James Merrill, Richard Howard, John Hollander & a whole host of less compelling folks – but also with a number of poets who in the late 1960s & early ‘70s turned away from that Anglo-centric & largely establishmentarian tradition seeking new & more vigorous modes of writing. Robert Bly, James Wright, W.S. Merwin & even Donald Hall can be read as variations of this same basic narrative, driven externally by the great social upheavals of that period – the Vietnam War, for example – and aesthetically by the challenge to their writing posed by the New American Poets. One can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for well-trained “professionally” oriented poets of that period to realize that their work paled in comparison to the drug-besotted verse of a Gregory Corso, let alone the more complex writing of an Olson, an Ashbery or a Ginsberg. Or to realize just how one-dimensional their sense of form & tradition seemed when placed alongside a Zukofsky, a Creeley, an O’Hara or a Duncan.

 

To poets of my generation – young enough to their children (Rich is three years younger than my mother) – watching the Brahmin tradition break apart was a terrific spectator sport not unlike watching the Johnson & Nixon administrations unravel in succession, a parallel instance of “the straight world” crumbling from its own internal contradictions. A book like Bill Merwin’s 1967 The Lice – still his best (and perhaps his only “important”) volume – riveted younger poets precisely for the ways it blasted apart everything we thought we knew about the poet of The Drunk in the Furnace or A Mask for Janus, collections of rigidly regimented conformity. It was one of those volumes you kept in your book bag during those years, alongside Dorn’s Gunslinger, Creeley’s Pieces & Duncan’s Bending the Bow.

 

At the same time, there was a second revolution starting to happen that was – at least in 1968 & thereabouts – invisible to folks with male genitalia like myself. Women in the civil rights & antiwar movements had begun to compare their own circumstances to those people on whose behalf they were often making great sacrifices, both in the U.S. and abroad. One merely needs to look back at the anti-draft poster popular in that era that featured Joan Baez & other women pictured above a slogan that read “Girls Say Yes to Men Who Say No” to see just how unreconstructed gender relations were then. 1968, after all, was the year in which Jane Fonda starred in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella.

 

The rise of second-wave feminism would impact every branch of American poetics (indeed, every branch of American life). In some ways, the three most instructive examples for the world of poetry might be Judy Grahn, Adrienne Rich & Denise Levertov. It was Grahn who first gave voice to this phenomenon in 1964 with a simple chapbook called Edward the Dyke and Other Poems. There is a rawness in Edward the Dyke even today that neither the Brahmin Rich nor the New American Levertov could ever approach – and that was no doubt necessary in just getting people to sit up & pay attention. It was not as tho no American poet had written of lesbian relationships before – Gertrude Stein’s crossover hit, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, after all had been published 30 years before & everybody knew that Toklas & Stein were more than (wink wink) two spinster ladies the way they were presented during that era by the likes of Time and Life. But it was Grahn who first insisted that desire had a political dimension.

 

Levertov, in contrast, became one of several New Americans – all associated with Black Mountain or Projectivist poetics, as it happened – who consciously turned away from that writing during this same period. LeRoi Jones went so far as to transform himself into Amiri Baraka while Ed Dorn, whose Gunslinger (it had not yet morphed into ‘Slinger) was read as a scandalous rejection of the Olsonian aesthetic, not unlike Merwin’s Lice in its relation to Lowell’s version of the Bos-town sound) put him into a position whereby, in 1973 when I put him onto a reading bill alongside Joanne Kyger & Robert Creeley, he was not even speaking to those other poets. The Projectivists I knew all thought of Levertov’s anti-war work & the writing that surrounded it as humorless & one-dimensional. I remember Robert Duncan saying, when I asked him if he was still in touch with her shortly after her departure from Berkeley circa 1972, “What would I have to say to her?” The feelings vis-à-vis Baraka were even more pained.

 

If Rich’s first two books, A Change of World (1951) & The Diamond-Cutters (1955) were documents of precisely the kind of conformity to the School of Quietude tradition that had marked the earliest Merwin or Bly (see his works in Poetry during the 1950s, for example), there were already undercurrents that would carry her elsewhere soon enough. Consider, for example, “An Unsaid Word” from Rich’s first book:

 

She who has the power to call her man

From that estranged intensity

Where his mind forages alone,

Yet keeps her peace and leaves him free,

And when his thoughts to her return

Stands where he left her, still his own,

Knows this the hardest thing to learn.

 

One might read the trajectory of her career as a long unlearning of that “lesson.” Unlike Merwin or Dorn, however, her move away from her inherited aesthetic wasn’t voiced as a sharp rejection all at once. One can see it starting to happen as early as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law in 1963, whose title poem is a sharp indictment of then-contemporary gender relations, but envisioning really no way out of what Rich herself terms the “solitary confinement” of marriage.

 

If each successive book was to take Rich further away from any role as an adjunct to male ambition, the point at which I noticed her abandonment of the Brahmin world didn’t come until she published the title poem of Diving into the Wreck in Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar magazine towards the end of that journal’s run. The whole idea of Rich in a publication edited by Eshleman was, circa 1971, so radical as to be unimaginable. Caterpillar was not only the last review that could honestly be called projectivist in its commitments¹, it was still quite militant about it in ways that no New York School journal would ever have dreamed of being. The symbolism of the quiet instant of self-repression visible in “An Unsaid Word” now becomes one of coming face to face with the visage of someone who has drowned.

 

Rich had in fact already arrived at this moment some years earlier (look at the title poem of Leaflets or “Pierrot Le Fou” in Will to Change – probably my favorite of all of Rich’s poems – but Eshleman’s publication made this apparent now to a wider range of folks, myself included, who, still grouping her in our minds alongside Lowell & Merrill, had not been paying much attention. And as Rich had become politicized, her poetry had moved away from the reductive well-wrought urns that confined her early writing, taking on essentially a post-Williams variation of free verse.

 

If it was Grahn who made the emergence of a women’s poetry audience possible – and I would argue that it was – Rich & Levertov both helped enormously to make this phenomenon accessible & even safe to a broad spectrum of readers who approached this new thing from previous aesthetic understandings & commitments. That is not an insignificant accomplishment. It changed writing in America, even for troglodyte straight white males like myself.² If you look at the anthology I edited 20 years ago, In the American Tree, you can’t help but notice that the ratio of male to female poets is nowhere near the parity that reflects the world of writing today. On the other hand, it’s much better a ratio than you will find in the Allen anthology – published 20 years prior to Tree. While the women who participated in the Tree certainly had the most to do with this, it’s impossible to imagine the world in which any of this writing took place without the active examples of Judy Grahn & Adrienne Rich.

 

 

¹ Indeed, this to my mind was the fundamental difference between Caterpillar & Eshleman’s later (and more eclectic) journal Sulfur. It was not as though Eshleman broke with the Olsonian tradition, but rather that he acknowledged that a moment in literary history had passed.

 

² In the 1960s at least, I simply was replicating the gender roles I had learned, but what, in all honesty, was I thinking? On my mother’s side, my mother, my great-grandmother & my great-great grandmother had all been single parents (in my great-grandmother’s case, of a family with 11 surviving children). My great-great grandmother had apparently been a sex worker early in the 19^th century – at least this is how I read her late husband’s family’s attempt to wrest control of her children after his death. My grandmother, the only one in four generations to successfully hold a marriage together for half a century, was psychotic & I knew that four of her sisters had had abortions by the end of World War I. Did I really imagine that family life was portrayed accurately on Father Knows Best?