The death of Adrienne Rich is particularly difficult for me in these days where it seems like issues we had thought resolved 40 years ago have resurfaced. She has led the way for a long time on feminist issues. She was also a wonderful poet, an exemplary human being. From the New York Times obituary today:
"Ms. Rich was far too seasoned a campaigner to think that verse alone
could change entrenched social institutions. “Poetry is not a healing
lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy,” she
said in an acceptance speech to the National Book Foundation in 2006, on
receiving its medal for distinguished contribution to American letters.
“Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a
billboard.”
But at the same time, as she made resoundingly clear in interviews, in
public lectures and in her work, Ms. Rich saw poetry as a keen-edged
beacon by which women’s lives — and women’s consciousness — could be
illuminated."
My son said this morning that she will be sorely missed. So you can see what he and I mean, here is one of her most beautiful poems.
Dreamwood
In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
or the child’s older self, a poet,
a woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day. If this were a map,
it would be the map of the last age of her life,
not a map of choices but a map of variations
on the one great choice. It would be the map by which
she could see the end of touristic choices,
of distances blued and purpled by romance,
by which she would recognize that poetry
isn’t revolution but a way of knowing
why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced
wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,
mass-produced yet durable, being here now,
is what is is yet a dream-map
so obdurate, so plain,
she thinks, the material and the dream can join
and that is the poem and that is the late report.
My son said this morning that she will be sorely missed. So you can see what he and I mean, here is one of her most beautiful poems.
Dreamwood
In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
or the child’s older self, a poet,
a woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day. If this were a map,
it would be the map of the last age of her life,
not a map of choices but a map of variations
on the one great choice. It would be the map by which
she could see the end of touristic choices,
of distances blued and purpled by romance,
by which she would recognize that poetry
isn’t revolution but a way of knowing
why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced
wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,
mass-produced yet durable, being here now,
is what is is yet a dream-map
so obdurate, so plain,
she thinks, the material and the dream can join
and that is the poem and that is the late report.
