Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) opposed pretty much every war she had an occasion to take a position on, from Vietnam to Iraq, but as a poet she characteristically linked causes and themes rather than separating them; in relatively few of her poems is an opposition to war, in general or in particular, distinguishable from a more wide-ranging critique of society as it is. The present selection, section XI of her long poem “An Atlas of the Difficult World,” first published in 1991, is more pointedly oppositional than most of her work, but even here the most distilled antiwar proclamations—“A patriot is not a weapon,” “every flag that flies today is a cry of pain”—are part of a more comprehensive meditation on the nature of patriotism, of belonging and not belonging, of the relations between peace and justice.
Rich’s early years are beautifully evoked in her 1972 essay “When We Dead Awaken.” She grew up in Baltimore, her father a noted pathologist, her mother a former concert pianist—“my own luck was being born white and middle-class into a house full of books, with a father who encouraged me to read and write,” she wrote. She went to Radcliffe, married, had three children. In 1951 she was chosen to receive the Yale Younger Poets prize by W. H. Auden, who said of her poems, “[they] are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs.”
But her growing sense of the political, and of the political in the personal, destabilized and energized her way of being and her way of writing. Awarded the National Book Award in 1973 for Diving into the Wreck, she accepted it with her fellow nominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walker on behalf of all women. She began to write wonderfully implacable essays, notably her 1980 “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” and came out as a lesbian. Her political commitments expanded, her intensity of political commitment deepened, centering more and more on feminist and lesbian issues. Her Jewishness became more central to her and her work. She turned steadily toward more open, more inclusive poetic forms.
Like some other poets, Rich refused a presidential honor; unlike them, she refused it not in relation to war but in relation to politics in general. She was awarded the 1997 National Medal of Arts, and in refusing wrote, “I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House, because the very meaning of art as I understand it is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.”
One night on Monterey Bay the death-freeze of the century:
a precise, detached calliper-grip holds the stars and the quarter-moon
in arrest: the hardiest plants crouch shrunken, a “killing frost”
on bougainvillea, Pride of Madeira, roseate black-purple succulents bowed
juices sucked awry in one orgy of freezing
slumped on their stems like old faces evicted from cheap hotels
—into the streets of the universe, now!
Earthquake and drought followed by freezing followed by war.
Flags are blossoming now where little else is blossoming
and I am bent on fathoming what it means to love my country.
The history of this earth and the bones within it?
Soils and cities, promises made and mocked, plowed contours of shame and of hope?
Loyalties, symbols, murmurs extinguished and echoing?
Grids of states stretching westward, underground waters?
Minerals, traces, rumors I am made from, morsel, minuscule fibre, one woman
like and unlike so many, fooled as to her destiny, the scope of her task?
One citizen like and unlike so many, touched and untouched in passing
—each of us now a driven grain, a nucleus, a city in crisis
some busy constructing enclosures, bunkers, to escape the common fate
some trying to revive dead statues to lead us, breathing their breath against marble lips
some who try to teach the moment, some who preach the moment
some who aggrandize, some who diminish themselves in the face of half-grasped events
—power and powerlessness run amuck, a tape reeling backward in jeering, screeching syllables—
some for whom war is new, others for whom it merely continues the old paroxysms of time
some marching for peace who for twenty years did not march for justice
some for whom peace is a white man’s word and a white man’s privilege
some who have learned to handle and contemplate the shapes of powerlessness and power
as the nurse learns hip and thigh and weight of the body he has to lift and sponge, day upon day
as she blows with her every skill on the spirit’s embers still burning by their own laws in the bed of death.
A patriot is not a weapon. A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country
as she wrestles for her own being, for the soul of his country
(gazing through the great circle at Window Rock into the sheen of the Viet Nam Wall)
as he wrestles for his own being. A patriot is a citizen trying to wake
from the burnt-out dream of innocence, the nightmare
of the white general and the Black general posed in their camouflage,
to remember her true country, remember his suffering land: remember
that blessing and cursing are born as twins and separated at birth to meet again in mourning
that the internal emigrant is the most homesick of all women and of all men
that every flag that flies today is a cry of pain.
Where are we moored?
What are the bindings?
What behooves us?