Adoring Adrienne Rich

From my 16th birthday, to a handclasp, to a letter, and a lifetime of poetry

I still have the copy of The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970, by Adrienne Rich that my sister, B. Ruby Rich, gave to me for my 16th birthday. The first single author book of poems I ever owned. What did my teenage self make of it? Dear Reader, my mind exploded. I was just turning 16 and already I was more than ready for transformation.

Looking back at this copy, here are the only words which I underlined in a time when I didn’t believe in underlining in books:

To read there the map of the future, the roads radiating from the

initial split, the filaments thrown out from that impasse.

To reread the instructions on your palm; to find there how the

lifeline, broken, keeps its direction.

from “Shooting Script,” final section

Now, more than 40 years later, I am amazed at how deeply the images and syntax have metabolized into my own work: maps, palm reading, and pushing to establish new roadways into a reformulated self. Poetry as alchemy.

Here was a woman (with my last name, but unfortunately, no relation) writing of the inchoate world that I’d intuited without having the words for such ideas. Was the wreck (I immediately purchased Diving into the Wreck:Poems 1971-1972 with my babysitting money) actually submerged underwater or was the wreck more of an internal, carved out shell of the mind?

This was serious poetry and at the same time, Rich seemed to be speaking directly to me. Her poems offered a young woman a different map on how to live one’s life. Not two roads diverged in a yellow wood but infinite pathways into underwater worlds, mountainous expeditions, and film scripts.

A few years later, in a quintessential New England church (First Congregational) in Leverett, Massachusetts, I was lucky enough to hear Adrienne Rich read her poems. She had been living in Western Massachusetts but would now be leaving for Santa Cruz, California for her health. She must have told us this that night. I’d just found her here my neighborhood and she was leaving already.

I’d found out about the reading at the last moment and cajoled a friend with a car to take me. There are two things I remember from that night. First, Rich had her eyes focused above our heads, reading, it seemed to the ceiling. However, when I turned around to follow her gaze with my own, I realized she was directing her words to the one woman standing in the center of the balcony, Michelle Cliff, her lover. It was the most romantic moment I’d ever witnessed.

After the reading, I made myself wait in line to speak with her and have her sign my copy of The Will to Change. When I told Adrienne Rich that B. Ruby Rich was my sister, she broke into a gigantic smile, stood-up from her chair, and took my right hand in both of hers. I was so moved by this that for a week I didn't clean my hand and held it outside of  the shower curtain when finally I had to wash. 

I can't remember what she said to me that night (probably that I should say hello to my sister) but for me, at that time,  it felt like I'd actually been seen and understood by my favorite living poet. Someone who at that point, I'd admired for years. 

And today, as I listened today to Rich reading "What Kind of Times are These,"  I feel again that I am listening to someone speaking from the present moment. She seems to have been as much a prophet as a poet.

"Planetarium" was another poem I loved; poems that pulled amazing women from the unwritten pages of history and made me feel connected to them. "Dream Wood" took my breath away as the poem infuses an old typing stand with revolution and with wonder. Her hyper awareness of her reader was so unlike anything I had ever read before. And then the love sonnets that she read that night in a Leverett church, unabashedly lesbian love poems.

Years later, as a graduate student at the University of Oregon in Eugene, I hatched a plan with my friend, the poet Kate lyn Hibbard, to invite Rich to come read at the university. And why not? (Did we ask anyone's permission, did we find funding?) And although she very politely turned us down ( I believe we asked her twice) each time we received a typed letter (!) signed from her in response. Each of us kept one of the letters. We were fan girls of the highest order. 

It's still impossible for me to believe she's been gone over a decade. The poet who had the strongest influence on my own work. The poet who refused the President's Medal of Honor under Clinton and wrote an open letter in the Los Angeles Times instead. The poet who made a cassette tape of her poems in Midnight Salvage so I could drive around Eugene, feeling she was in the car with me. 

Rich wasn't cuddly or interested in much attention; she took her role as a public poet seriously but there were many years in the 1970's when her poetry became explicitly feminist and the mainstream press hardly covered her at all. She had been anointed by W.H.Auden with the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1950 when she was only 21, for her book, A Change of World. Now her "well mannered" poems had taken a decidedly radical turn.

I keep writing now as if my words might conjure her; might bring her back to life. This quarter one of my brightest students has chosen to do a focused study on an Atlas of a Difficult World. Perhaps the best thing about being a professor is teaching one's students of your heroes. I will let you know how it goes.