Just in time for Poetry Month, I finished my leisurely reading (pace-wise, not in terms of attention) of Adrienne Rich's career-spanning Selected Poems. I have my favorites (particularly around the middle years), but there's nothing to dislike or be less impressed by. I admire writers whose style transforms over time; the voice remains the same--it's brave, fierce, sensual, and socially questing and challenging--while the poems grow longer, multi-sectioned, expansive. Nearly every poem contains at least one line or image that I wanted to underline twice. Already I've been inspired to write after particular poems.

 

Adrienne Rich is essential reading for women, lgbtq folks, feminists, poets, those interested in poetry, and those deeply concerned with social consciousness. If you're already familiar with her from Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law and/or Diving Into the Wreck, there's more to explore.

So good. At least one astonishing line per poem. Happy to finally be reading this poet's work from across her career.

Rich, who died in March, described herself as "a poet who knows the social power of poetry," and in these essays she explores the alchemy of "the possibilities that exist between two people, or among a group of people. They are the most interesting thing in life."

I agree with that, and for years have admired her perspectives more than I have enjoyed her poetry, which I can take only in small doses. I found lots of good food for thought here, though my enthusiasm waxed and waned throughout the meandering compilation. I got most involved with her notions about how imagination conspires with intellect in the creative process, and its influence on identity and relationships.

"A certain freedom of the mind is needed, freedom to press on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, that the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away. Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living."

How to facilitate that kind of creative freedom within the context of one's daily commitments and chores has been much on my mind lately, and I wanted to read more about it than this volume provided. What I did read was well worth it, but it's a given that any collection by Rich is going to be as political as it personal, which I appreciate but happen not to be in the mood for. Perhaps that's why the read felt disjointed to me and I'm not giving it five stars.

The New York Times did a nice obit on her, which noted that for decades she was "among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose; the poetry alone has sold nearly 800,000 copies, according to W. W. Norton & Company, her publisher since the mid-1960s. Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined."

Complete obit at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/29/books/adrienne-rich-feminist-poet-and-author-dies-at-82.html?pagewanted=all

Rich is one of my favorite poets, and there are few words to describe how beautiful and thoughtful these poems are. This slim volume is divided into three sections, "Power," "Twenty-One Love Poems," and "Not Somewhere Else, But Here." This is one of her later collections, written after receiving the National Book Award, and is remarkable for it's openness in writing about sexuality, power and violence against women."Twenty-One Love Poems" is perfection, a distilled experience of a relationship arc, and XVII is permanently etched on my consciousness. It begins:"No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.The accidents happen, we're not heroines,they happen in our lives like car crashes,books that change us, neighborhoodswe move into and come to love."I've read it almost as many times as "Origins and History of Consciousness," in the "Power" group, and find it is sheer excellence of how a writer strives to interpret self and other:"No one lives in this roomwithout confronting the whiteness of the wallbehind the poems, planks of books,photographs of dead heroines.Without contemplating last and latethe true nature of poetry. The drive to connect. The dream of a common language.Thinking of lovers, their blind faith, their experienced crucifixions,my envy is not simple.""Cartographies of Silence" also stands out. To me, Rich is at her best writing about language, identity and love, and virtually every line floors me. "Silence can be a planrigorously executed"The remainder of the poems are somewhat uneven for me, especially the "Not Somewhere Else" section, which seem to be primarily odes and center around specific people. They provide interesting insight into both Rich and the time period she writes in, particularly the poem for Audre Lorde. I could probably leave this in my GR "currently reading" shelves indefinitely, as I periodically revisit it, each time finding more to appreciate. If I'm headed for a writing sabbatical, this is one that always gets stuffed in the backpack.Adrienne, you will be dearly missed.

Rich's poetry contains many powerful images but it doesn't really flow together for me. Most of the poems seem to be image after image after image. Each one is interesting and vividly described but I need more of a connector or it just feels like a string of metaphors.