Rest in Peace, Adrienne Rich
I wasn't your biggest fan by a mile, but you had a principled integrity that wouldn't even occur to most poets, and I always admired you for that.
http://uchicagopress.tumblr.com/post...r-the-national |
A sad loss, but a literary life well lived and well written.
Background here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/adrienne-rich Poems and audio here: http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetrya....do?poetId=428 Best, Bill |
I sometimes think there are two kinds of poets: the fastidious ones (Larkin, Bishop, Eliot) who only publish strong work, and other kind, who challenge and push and extend and sometimes in the course of things publish second-rate work. If Rich falls into the latter category, she is also an astonishment, a life force in contemporary American poetry. We would be poorer without her work, and not just for its politics, but also for its expression of the passionate life. Blessings on her. As the Greeks say, May the earth rest lightly upon her, and eternal be her memory.
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Oh crap, the good people are dying... Thanks for posting, Quincy. I think her work has been quite often amazing--she had such a range. I also read her essays, years ago; they meant a lot to me at the time. And I met her once at a reading at UCLA; she was lovely, took the time to chat, really sweet, although of course she could be a tiger in public life. And yes, you're right, Quincy, integrity was present in her actions and her work.
I couldn't get your link to work, but found stuff on Google about her death. Thanks, Bill, for the other links. Peace, Charlotte |
Quote:
Ah, the brave and capable poets of yesteryear. We mourn their passing. |
Diving Into the Wreck
First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear. Adrienne Rich |
RIP. I associate reading her with a certain time frame. I loved her bravery.
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“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe. It is as if forces we can lay claim to in no other way become present to us in sensuous form. The knowledge and use of this magic goes back very far; the rune, the chant, the incantation, the spell, the Kenning, sacred words, forbidden words, the naming of the child, the plant, the insect, the ocean, the configuration of stars, the snow, the sensation in the body. The ritual telling of the dream. The physical reality of the human voice; of words gouged or incised in stone or wood, woven in silk or wool, painted on vellum, or traced in sand.”
Adrienne Rich |
Thank you, Mems.
Copied and kept... Cally |
Song
by AR You're wondering if I'm lonely: OK then, yes, I'm lonely as a plane rides lonely and level on its radio beam, aiming across the Rockies for the blue-strung aisles of an airfield on the ocean. You want to ask, am I lonely? Well, of course, lonely as a woman driving across country day after day, leaving behind mile after mile little towns she might have stopped and lived and died in, lonely If I'm lonely it must be the loneliness of waking first, of breathing dawns' first cold breath on the city of being the one awake in a house wrapped in sleep If I'm lonely it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore in the last red light of the year that knows what it is, that knows it's neither ice nor mud nor winter light but wood, with a gift for burning |
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