Bookplanet: fiery Adrienne Rich has a new book of poems out

The political is personal
Review of The School Among The Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 by Adrienne Rich
Just don’t mention the White House when the poet Adrienne Rich is around. John Freeman gets the message

THE PAST FOUR YEARS HAVE been good ones for poetry in America. A poet, Dana Gioia, was appointed head of the National Endowment of the Arts. Spoken-word events are packed. Even corporate largesse has come calling.

In 2002 the pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lily announced that she would be giving nearly $150 million (£75 million) to the magazine Poetry. Overnight, a tiny journal became one of the richest publications in the US.

Good as this sounds, Adrienne Rich hasn’t been rushing to celebrate. “Poetry, the art, doesn’t need billions infused into one institution,” the 77-year-old poet said, her face souring. “I think artists would do better in a society that was more economically just.”

Looking a gifthorse in the mouth is one of her specialities. She has won nearly every prize available to an American poet and has turned down several. In 1978, she rejected the National Book Award as an individual to accept it on behalf of silenced voices everywhere. Bill Clinton wanted to give her the National Medal of Arts, but she refused.“I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art is incompatible with the cynical politics of this Administration.”

Sitting at an Italian restaurant in Manhattan, Rich doesn’t look like a troublemaker. She is small and tidy, her eyes beatific in moments of pleasure — for example when she talks about jazz or film or young people. But shift the conversation to governments and her voice grows hard and clear. “I, for many, many years have felt not just that the personal becomes political,” she says, “but that the political becomes personal.”

It is a remarkable statement from a poet who worked so hard to get the message across the other way around — that women’s bodies were battlegrounds, that their voices had been silenced. But a lot has changed since the driving, declarative poems in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963) and Diving into the Wreck (1973) made Rich a feminist icon. Personal narrative — once a vehicle for feminism — has ushered in the Glamour magazine confessional. Women have obtained higher pay — but at what cost, Rich wonders.

“Women in political power can give us a Margaret Thatcher,” she says. “It’s given us Condoleezza Rice. The question is: what does one do with the power one gets?” Rich has similar concerns about poetry now that it has millions and is emblazoned on subway cards. Accepting a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation, recently, she defended it from commercialisation. “Poetry is not a billboard,” she said. “It is not linguistic aromatherapy. It is not a massage.”

Rich is particularly concerned with the state of political poetry, because in the US “there are always arguments against poetry in the public discourse, arguments particularly against an engaged poetry”.

Rich, born in Baltimore in 1929, came of age in the heyday of new criticism, when writers such as F. R. Leavis and William Empson all but crushed the notion that a poem could have a reference point outside itself. In a sense, she has had to fight this twice — first diving into the wreck of her identity as a woman, then backing out into the wider world.

“My (past five books) are interrogating the mood and what it’s like to be in the US at this time, from a variety of perspectives,” she says. “Whether powerless or powerful, whether privileged or not, and how the conditions of the public world impinged on our own private lives, as I believe they do.”

One does not have to look far to find examples of what Rich is talking about. “Questions of who can you love, what do we as individuals see and what do we not see, to paraphrase Muriel Rukeyser,” she says, rattling off the latest flashpoints in American life. “Also — what do we think of as the world? Americans have been prone to think of ourselves as the world.”

One collection at a time, Rich is trying to smash that parochialism. Lately, her most receptive audience has been students. This is a change. Ten years ago, when she travelled the country, she would hear questions such as: “How do I get published?” and “Do I need an agent as a poet?” “That doesn’t come up now,” Rich says, a smile breaking. “The last place I had been was Northwestern University, and there were students there from all walks and many different fields. And they all really wanted to talk about art and politics.”

As Rich points out, this mixture of intellectual rigour and passion cannot be bought or created. It rises up out of the verse itself. “Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility,/ restore numbed tones of feeling, recharge desire,” she once wrote about passion. It applies to politics, too, she has discovered, and is reminding us all over again.