How Adrienne Rich Wrote a New World

Attempts to mend the world have been made by many people, Adrienne Rich was someone who endeavoured to do so with her poetry, reforming the literary landscape in the process. A 20th century American poet, essayist and prose writer best known for her work in the feminist movement, she died at the age of eighty-two in the March of this year. During a distinguished and influential career, Rich made social history by marrying together art and politics making her an unavoidably significant writer for men and women alike.

Rich was a prolific writer, for me her poetry began with her collection; ‘Diving into the Wreck’(1973), which marked her as truly outstanding. Women in poetic discourse had been neglected; Rich changed this by providing poetry that offered her own terms for equality. The collection also won the National Book Award, which she did not accept as an individual, instead in the name of all the unknown female writers. Her work stepped away from the formal male rigours of her predecessors, allowing more open forms, using “non-poetic” language for accessibility.

The collection was written in the midst of the Vietnam War, struggle for women’s rights, and the echoes of the civil rights movement of the 60s. Rich’s world was troubled to say the least, and she was not shy in voicing her anger and rage for social justice. For this reason her work can be categorised with the same angst as Sylvia Plath, her female ‘rival’ at the time.

The title poem in the collection is representative of Rich, her work, and her career. She takes you on an undersea adventure, documenting the sunken wreck and the otherworldliness of it all. With this she explores topics of identity; as a marginalised woman, Jew and lesbian, these concerns of identity politics are a heavy feature in many of her works; the relations to the past and solitude. The story takes the reader to question these issues making the poem an emotional experience, not in the tacky sense.

In a time where women’s rights are still yet to be justified in a satisfactory manner, her work half a century later still has the same immediacy as it did then. She is truly an inspirational poet.

Adrienne Rich 1929 -2012

“I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled

this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.”

(Extract from; What Kind of Times are These by Adrienne Rich)