Download `...when poetry lays its hand on our shoulder...` Adrienne Rich, 1929

‘...when poetry lays its hand on our shoulder...’ Adrienne Rich, 1929 -2012
1995: a small, middle-aged woman poet in the darkened auditorium of the South Bank’s Queen
Elizabeth Hall, leaning on a transparent stick. I confess to not being able to remember what she read,
only her quiet, authoritative voice and that magic stick, that gathered the light but, unlike Prospero’s
staff, remains for me unbroken.
First the stick. No stage prop but a necessary support for someone who had suffered from rheumatoid
arthritis since her twenties, with all the debility and pain that this auto-immune disease involves.
Nevertheless, at fifty seven, after the birth of three children and her husband’s death, she is able to say
to her woman lover, “The woman who cherished / her suffering is dead... I love the scar tissue she
handed on to me”. Tough on her own suffering and bracing, to say the least, about those women who
were unable to escape the ‘house arrest’ imposed by male expectations of women’s writing – she
famously remarked ‘We have had enough suicidal women poets...enough self-destructiveness as the
sole form of violence permitted for women’. She struggled all her writing life to transcend her own
background and understand ‘otherness’ across the barriers of race, gender, class.
That evening by the Thames, I bought her 1993 Notebooks on Poetry and Politics: What is Found
There. What I found was a lucid, passionate, generous exploration of the deepest nature of poetry and
its relationship to human struggle. Years later when thinking of writing a dissertation, my potential
tutor said of Rich’s poetry ‘But don’t you find it clunks rather...?’ No I don’t! Yes, sometimes it shows
its rivets and its making but in the main the poet who says “We want to live like trees, / sycamores
blazing through the sulfuric air, / dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding” has found an
extraordinary, lyrical fusion between the ‘politics’ of ordinary experience and its heart. Critics who
had rather she continued writing safe poems that were ‘neatly and modestly dressed...’ – Auden’s
words for the citation of A Change of World as winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award – and who
consider that American poetry ‘lost’ a fine lyric poet when she became an activist, need to look again.
As Eavan Boland so generously says in A Journey With Two Maps, for Rich ‘The love between
women, sexual and ethical, becomes a visionary strategy for imagining a new America...’ Twenty-one
Love Poems are written within the framework of a lesbian relationship but are about love as the
alternative structure within which our dysfunctional body politic can be healed.
That Rich didn’t only write from the viewpoint of a radical lesbian feminist but struggled to
understand the experiences of people and creatures outside her – and their – comfort zones, of course,
got her into trouble with some of the feminists of her day. For me, that willingness to transcend all
orthodoxies, even the new ‘revolutionary’ kind, in a search for the closest approximation to the ‘truth’
in its particularity, is a signal of the kind of bravery under fire that I only wish I could emulate!
She says in her Guardian article quoted above, ‘I’m both a poet and one of the ‘everybodies’ of my
country. I live with manipulated fear, ignorance, cultural confusion and social antagonism huddling
together on the faultline of empire. I hope never to idealise poetry – it has suffered enough from that.
Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a
blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry... only poetry and
poetics and the streaming, intertwined histories to which they belong.’
Thank you Adrienne Rich for making me examine my poetic and my very ordinary conscience once
again. Your strange, transparent walking stick is still leading the way for me.
Kate Foley
*from Rich’s Guardian article, Legislators of the World, 18.11.06
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