(1975)
If you still don’t believe in cultural differences between Canada and the United States, you should try comparing poetry readings. You might find the same stanza forms in each country, but you’d probably find very different audiences. Unless the poet is ultra-famous, the U.S. audience would be smaller and would consist largely of students, other poets and assorted literati. In Canada it would be more varied: for some reason, Canadians read more poetry per capita than any other country in the English-speaking world. And the difference shows up in the way poets write in the two countries, in their assumptions about their audiences: white male American poets often write as if they think they’re talking only to other white male American poets, displaying their professional bags of tricks for other connoisseurs. They have nothing to say to ordinary people, because ordinary people aren’t listening. The atmosphere can get fairly rarefied.
The exceptions to this prevailing climate are, of course, the poets from the ethnic minority groups; and women. A sense of grievance, a consciousness of oppression, can often provide a force and a driving power for those who attempt to give them a voice. Such poets are less interested in displaying their verbal virtuosity than in getting something said; urgency replaces ambiguity, all seven types of it.
Adrienne Rich’s selected poems is a perfect demonstration of the evolution from introspective to didactic; it’s also a perfect contradiction of those who claim that politics and poetry can’t be mixed. Rich is perhaps the best known living woman poet in the United States (although cultural differences of some kind showed up when a leading Canadian book review editor failed to recognize the name). Though she’d published six earlier books, it was Diving Into the Wreck (1973) that brought her to her current prominence. It received the National Book Award, which Rich accepted not only for herself but on behalf of the other two women who were nominated but didn’t win. The jacket cover proclaims her a radical feminist, with no qualifications.
She’s the kind of poet of whom an unwary critic is likely to say, “The strongest voice to emerge from the feminist movement,” or some such inaccuracy. For Rich didn’t emerge from the feminist movement. She’s been publishing books since 1950, that’s 25 years, and Poems Selected And New (McLeod, $9.95) is a reminder of that fact. Indeed some of these poems are strangely prophetic, anticipating many of the themes that were later hit on as fresh discoveries by the feminist movement. To read through the book is to feel, often, that others have expanded into whole books what Rich had written in a few lines, ten or fifteen years earlier.
… Thus wrote
a woman, partly brave and partly good,
who fought with what she partly understood
hence she was labelled harpy, shrew and whore.
That’s Rich on Mary Wollstonecraft in “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law,” written, amazingly, in 1958, a poem which also quotes, for Rich’s own good purposes, Dr. Johnson’s quip about a female preacher being like a dog walking on its hind legs:
Not that it is done well, but
that it is done at all? Yes think
of the odds! or shrug them off forever
This luxury of the precocious child,
Time’s precious chronic invalid —
would we, darlings, resign it if we could?
Our blight has been our sinecure:
mere talent was enough for us —
glitter in fragments and rough drafts.
The same poem ends with a prophecy of not the second coming, but the first; the arrival of a woman who will finally take the risks and make the leap, “be more merciless to herself than history,” give up “femininity” for real achievement.
There’s something of self-portraiture here, for this was the line of development Rich’s own poetry took. At the beginning of the book she’s just another young poet learning a craft, a craft whose terms were defined by her male contemporaries. Though her earlier poems already show a certain epigrammatic terseness of line, a clenched, somewhat unrelenting toughness of intellect, they are often abstract; it’s as if the poet is talking only to herself. Even when the poems are addressed to a second person, she speaks as if she isn’t really sure she will be heard.
As it develops, Adrienne Rich’s poetry moves toward mercilessness, of a desirable kind. Her discovery of her own poetic voice, of what she wants to say, and of her audience, who she’s saying it to, are clearly interdependent. The early poems skirt emotion or muse upon it; experiences have given rise to the poems, but we’re often not too sure what, exactly, they are. In later ones emotions are not talked about but expressed or evoked, often with blunt and sometimes brutal force. The earlier poems are full of “craft;” in the later ones technique has been so thoroughly assimilated that we don’t even notice it. Language is honed down, decoration trimmed off; the poet has no more use for frills, no need to demonstrate that she too is an adept. The earlier poems illustrate; the later ones state.
As the language tightens, the focus narrows and sharpens: Rich’s subject becomes the struggle of woman, interpreted on almost every possible level: emotional, political, mythological, symbolic, historical. The poems become at the same time both personal and more universal: Rich is speaking, not to some nebulous listener, but to her own deepest self and to the corresponding selves of other women. For women become the audience: when she says “us,” that’s who she means:
I long to create something
that can’t be used to keep us passive…
When poems are addressed to men, the tone is no longer contemplative. There are few poets who have been better able to express anger.
The intention and the result, in the last three sections of the book, is nothing less than the creation of a new history and a new mythology. A number of woman poets have been working along the same lines, but few with such success. Sometimes the poems decline into rhetoric, sometimes they become shrill, but not often. At their best they are absolutely succinct, absolutely powerful; rooted in the actual, they move into the subterranean levels where myths are alive. “Diving into the Wreck,” “From a Survivor,” “Trying to Talk with a Man,” are Rich at her best.
The long poem at the end of the book, “From an Old House in America,” is in some way Rich’s most ambitious, and most definitive poem to date: compact, simple in phrasing, fiercely intellectual, uncompromising, a condensed Leaves of Grass, but this time from the woman’s point of view:
Isolation, the dream
of the frontier woman
levelling her rifle along
the homestead fence
still snares our pride
—a suicidal leaf
laid under the burning-glass
in the sun’s eye
Any woman’s death diminishes me
This book is clearly a seminal one in the history of women’s poetry. It’s also an important landmark in the development of a remarkable individual poet. It’s a necessary book: necessary for the reader, but also one feels, for the writer. There are few poems that convince you, as the best of Rich’s do, that they had to be written.