Heavy cold rains pouring down, a welcome relief. The dog furious that I have taken away his sunshine. Put down old threadbare rugs and towelling at the back door to catch the tracked-in mud, took out rain jackets and wellington boots from the spare room. Planning a luxurious fish pie for supper with a little smoked salmon, flaked yellowtail fish and cream, buttery mashed potatoes with a little grated Parmesan. Rain like dull music in the background, punctuated by deep sighs from the housebound Great Dane. The smaller dogs are curled up tight on the sofa, content to snuggle indoors for the day. The overgrown puppy sits staring out at the falling rain, wondering when I will relent and make it hot and bright again.
I’m sad too, gazing out at the rain on a dark morning, because one of my favourite poets died this week, the iconic lesbian feminist Adrienne Rich, at the age of 82. I had been waiting for another book from her and feel bereft to know that trenchant political voice has gone silent. For at least 30 years I have carried her poems around with me, bought new books of poetry and essays, I remember finding a copy of A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far and taking it with me everywhere, learning the poems off by heart, unsure what I was reading except that it stirred me. And borrowing The Dream of a Common Language until I could buy my own copy. The essays: On Lies, Secrets and Silence, the book examining myths around motherhood (Of Woman Born), the radical revolutionary statements, the fearlessness. I suppose I don’t mention her often enough because I try to sidestep controversy here, but in all my thinking there has been the debt owed to Adrienne Rich, the mother of three sons, Jewish, lesbian, disabled by rheumatoid arthritis, that voice speaking to women about what might be possible.
“If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.”
She refused the National Medal of the Arts in 1997. “The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate,” she wrote in a letter addressed to then-President Clinton. “A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”
She established solidarity with silenced women in apartheid South Africa, Nicaragua, Guatemala, worked with refugees and spoke out constantly against bigotry and prejudice.
“To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence — words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.”
So strange to live on a world without Adrienne Rich there. She was a contemporary of Sylvia Plath, of Anne Sexton in the 1950s and ’60s, began with polite ladylike poems that echoed the great men poets of the day. She changed, she found her own voice and dared to use it. What might Plath have written if she had not committed suicide? What might Anne Sexton have written if she had not been snared by alcoholism? Again and again in her poetry, Adrienne Rich urges women to move beyond victimisation, to fight for a better life, to believe in themselves and the dream of a common language.
Sometimes the moon
and I discern a woman
I loved, drowning in secrets, fear wound round her throat
and choking her like hair. And this is she
with whom I tried to speak, whose hurt, expressive head
turning aside from pain, is dragging down deeper
where it cannot hear me,
and soon I shall know I was talking to my own soul.
Everyone, especially women, owe a debt to her for speaking the truth, for never compromising for awards or money. That kind of integrity is extremely difficult. I know I’m not that brave.
A beautiful tribute….
Lou, the outpouring of tributes across the Internet has amazed and touched me — she did speak for so many who didn’t have the voice or courage and her work was so significant. I thought of her as my private discovery and inspiration and had no idea what a giant she was amongst writers.
Adrienne was also one of my all-time favorites. Though Twenty-One Love Poems is a masterpiece, An Atlas of the Difficult World is always in my mind every late Friday afternoon, when I’m the only one left in the office.
It too is raining where I am now. Thank you for another great post.
Hi Rhonnie –as I read that same poem late in the office before leaving work and thinking of other women in other places reading the same lines –
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I’m bereft about Adrienne Rich’s passing. Her poem Transcendental Etude has informed my spirituality and worldview since I first read it at 18. I want to BE the woman at the end of that poem, sitting at her kitchen table, removed from the noise, quietly sorting through the fabric of a life.
Hi G, yes I thought of you while writing the post, how hard it is with relationships in recovery, how hard to come out and get parental support, how hard to let go of past lovers –
And this I can’t resist quoting so that others might read what you mention, from Transcendental Etude
Vision begins to happen in such a life
as if a woman quietly walked away
from the argument and jargon in a room
and sitting down in the kitchen, began turning in her lap
bits of yarn, calico and velvet scraps,
laying them out absently on the scrubbed boards
in the lamplight, with small rainbow- colored shells
sent in cotton-wool from somewhere far away
and skeins of milkweed from the nearest meadow
original domestic silk, the finest findings
and the darkblue petal of the petunia,
and the dry darkbrown face of seaweed;
not forgotten either, the shed silver
whisker of the cat,
the spiral of paper-wasp-nest curling
beside the finch’s yellow feather.
Such a composition has nothing to do with eternity,
the striving for greatness, brilliance
only with the musing of a mind
one with her body, experienced fingers quietly pushing
dark against bright; silk against roughness,
putting the tenets of a life together
with no mere will to mastery,
only care for the many-lived, unending
forms in which she finds herself,
becoming now the sherd of broken glass
slicing light in a corner, dangerous
to flesh, now the plentiful, soft leaf
that wrapped round the throbbing finger, soothes the wound;
and now the stone foundation, rockshelf further
forming underneath everything that grows.
That is my favorite part of the whole poem! Those lines: “with no mere will for mastery, only care for the many-lived, unending forms in which she finds herself…” sums up the entire goal of my life. (if I had to pick just one.)
I think that women have a great deal of courage for the rightness in life. Without regard to ego but to take a stand that is about what is right and good. I find that a great asset and an inspiration.
Men too Syd, I have worked with many gentle gay and black men fighting against homophobia and racist, allies to women, ordinary people just working together for change. It is so important to take a stand
I heard an old interview with her on the radio the other day – I guess the day she died. She sounded like someone I would have wanted to know.
She was somebody I felt I did know, her work resonated so much with me. There are videos of her reading, that courage and honesty.