Recently, I listened to a prominent literary critic speaking to a group of young poets—many of them my students—in a graduate writing program. He told them that if they didn’t like the way things were being run in the country, the thing for them to do was to devote some time each week to organizing voters and advocating social change, but to be sure to keep their political concerns out of their work, as it would do “terrible damage to their poetry, as it did to the poets of the 1970s.” My first reaction was to think that my students should be so lucky for their work to be informed by such a clear, compassionate purpose. I was taken aback by the critic’s absolute certainty, his lack of a more nuanced or complex position—and then I thought, well, critics have probably been giving precisely this advice to poets since the beginning of literary time, and poets have been ignoring them and continuing to allow whatever was central to them to shape their poems.
Adrienne Rich has been brilliantly and challengingly pursuing her passions for some five decades now, and if my students seek an example of what happens when a poet follows what matters most to her, they need look no further. Her lived commitment to questioning and revealing the structures of power and how we live within them turns out to be “the huge rockshelves” under her work, as Rich put it once in a great poem called “Transcendental Etude.” These rockshelves are the ground upon which she has founded a sustaining poetic, a life’s work—but also the ground upon which to build her profoundly generous gift to others: a deep, public valuing of the common life.
Walt Whitman wrote, in the preface to the first edition of Leaves of Grass, that the proof of a poet was that he’d be “absorbed into the affections of his country as firmly as he has absorbed it.” A year later, after he’d sold maybe two dozen copies of his book, he revised that sentence: “The proof of a poet,” he wrote, “must be sternly deferred until he has been absorbed into the affections of his country.” Adrienne Rich’s volumes of poems and collections of essays, I hardly need tell you, have been showered by every award available to an American writer, including the Bollingen Prize and the Wallace Stevens Award. This evening she receives the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, joining Gwendolyn Brooks as the only poets ever to be so honored. Her poems are foundational texts of our time, and, in the future, when readers want to understand the great reconsideration of gender and power that reshaped American life, it is to Rich’s poems that they will turn. Now I suppose this means that she has been “absorbed” in the way Whitman meant, but in truth that has not been her goal; she has remained a gadfly, a vigilant witness somehow both at the center and in the margins of her age. When the Clinton White House invited her to come to Washington to accept a National Medal for the Arts, she declined to accept an award from an administration she saw as abusing its powers; I probably don’t need to tell you that the current administration has not been forthcoming with an invitation. Her restless empathy for those not in positions of power—women, the poor, laborers, queer women and men, the immigrant—is the ethical basis of her art. And if the critic in his position of aesthetic purity believes that poems suffer from it, then perhaps we’ve labored under a hobblingly narrow definition of poetry, a fiction of a realm in which words in their harmonies and shadings operate at a remove from the world, in some sacred grove. That idyllic glen, if it ever existed, was entered by human traffic long ago, and where people live, inequity resides. Rich has spent her entire career gazing into that difficult truth. In Adrienne Rich’s strong hands, the poem is an instrument for change, if we can see into the structures of power and take on the work of making a dream— “the dream of a common language”—an actuality. As Whitman did, she calls us toward the country we could be, though she insists that we acknowledge the country we are.
There is a beautiful essay of Rilke’s called “The Vocation of the Poet,” in which the German poet describes a journey to Egypt sometime toward the beginning of the twentieth century, and how he saw there, on the Nile, an old-style boat rowed by many rowers. At its front sat a man with a drum, facing the oarsmen, setting their pace. But in front of him sat someone else, a singer, whose job it was to face into the direction the boat was heading, singing into the future.
That is what Adrienne Rich has been doing over the long, brave haul of a remarkable career, and through that singing she has helped us to see where we are and where we’re heading. Her words, given and given again, have helped to make that future what it will be; she has lent a voice to what our best selves might make. Like Whitman, Rich has created her audience; like her predecessor Muriel Rukeyser, she has spoken into a silence and readers have risen to her words awakened, changed.
Please join me in saluting an essential American writer.