Adrienne Rich - Any help would me much appreciated :)

[Eager_Rose]

Hi!
I am now looking at Adrienne Rich, and before I start any essays, I would like to get a grasp of what some her poems are about.
I am going to try and focus more on the poems which exhibit Rich's concerns about women in the patriarchal society.
If anyone can post any contextual information about Rich it would be great, as I have no resources here with me except the internet.

The first poem I am going to look at is:

"From a Survivor"

The pact that we made was the ordinary pact
of men & women in those days

I don't know who we thought we were
that our personalities
could resist the failures of the race

Lucky or unlucky, we didn't know
the race had failures of that order
that we were going to share them

Like everybody else, we thought of ourselves as special

Your body is as vivid to me
as it ever was: even more

since my feeling for it is clearer:
I know what it could and could not do

it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life

Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making

which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of brief, amazing movements

each one making possible the next


Ideas:

• The persona is speaking about the marriage between two people who loved each other dearly, and who thought that the ideals of their society would not affect their “pact”.
• However, their race has flaws and failures which determine the man’s actions and power, and so no matter whom the two loves are individuals will always find themselves following the society’s unwritten rules.

it is no longer
the body of a god
or anything with power over my life

• After getting to know this man, and his physical abilities, she realizes that there is nothing special or powerful about him.

Questions:
• I don’t understand the last bit of the poem, starting from “Next year…”
Does “wastefully dead” suggest that the partner to whom this poem is addressed is really dead, or just after the 20 years of marriage he is dead to her?

There is a jump from
“we talked, too late, of making”

to

“Which I live now”

Unlike the other stanzas in the poem, there is no real connection, until she says “not as a leap”, “leap” being a repeated word.
This whole part is a bit hazy for me


• I understand that the structure of this poem has an impact on the way we read it but I really can’t make the connection. What do you think?
• There is not much punctuation in this poem, in fact when I look closer there are no full stops at all, what can this suggest?


Through out the rest of the day ill be posting two more poems. Thanks to all who read, and posted :d

[Inez]

I used to have a thing about this poet although it has been so long I don’t remember details, but if my off the cuff thoughts help, you are welcome to them. J

Rich married in 1953 and this poem was published almost twenty years later - hence the direct reference to it almost being 20 years - in a book entitled Diving into the Wreck. During which she was exploring herself as a woman and her life as a woman and, although not mentioned explicitly, a lesbian. This poem, addressed to her ex-husband is clearly one of those exploratory poems and is very clearly autobiographical. The personal is the political to Rich.

I quote from one of the links: “ In 1956, she began dating her poems to underscore their existence within a context, and to argue against the idea that poetry existed separately from the poet's life. Stylistically, she began to draw on contemporary rhythms and images, especially those derived from the cinematic techniques of jump cuts and collage. Leaflets (1969), The Will to Change (1971), and Diving into the Wreck (1973) demonstrate a progressive coming to power as Rich contends against the desolation patriarchy enacts on literal and psychic landscape. Intimately connected with this struggle for empowerment and action is the deepening of her determination "to write directly and overtly as a woman, out of a woman's body and experience."”

It’s a wonderfully positive poem – of rejoicing in her survival – and amazement at the richness of the ‘movements’ that she has made since leaving this man.

It is not without its sorrows for past loss: she suggest all that useful optimism when they first married, I think, in her opening lines. She then talks of him as ‘wastefully dead’. The ‘dead’ indicates he is either dead for her – or perhaps just dead to himself as he did not appear to have lived up to his potential as he did not make the ‘great leap’. ‘who might have made’ strikes a note of something lost, and the ‘wastefully’ signified she regrets (for his sake or hers is not clear) that this failure of his was so. The fact that this statement is in the stanza which includes her comment that he could have made the leap (but failed) this does suggest that he was the one who wasted the opportunities.

It is hard not to see her life in the statement that his body has no power over her as she discovered herself to be a lesbian; but also there is the fact that men had power over women and so he has lost that power in the wider sense too as the seventies were a time of great optimism in terms of gender politics.

“since my feeling for it is clearer:/I know what it could and could not do” indicates that she didn’t have a clear view of him when they first married. She was therefore also was subject to the failures of their race but unlike him, the poem makes it clear that she did not fail to make changes.

The use of the word ‘god’ in interesting as I would tend to take that to be said in the sense his body was once desirable, but she them talks of it having power over her and that has other connotations and seems political rather than sexual by my reading, which suggests that ‘god’ is not meant as a term of praise, even retrospectively after all. The regret she might otherwise be assumed to be expressing is subverted by her earlier statement that she is seeing him clearly now. I am not sure if I have put that well though.

It is clear that she learned something about the nature of change along the way, too. She once thought it was a “great leap” that was required and has since found out it is in fact a series of “brief, amazing movements”.

I am not too good on structure, but I do think it looks like a wave being washed back on the page and tied with the title of the collection and its links to the sea, this makes me think it could represent the tide going out.

The last line being separated like that makes it stand out as a strong, affirmative statement – an upbeat notes from a string woman looking towards the future; a future which leads on to more self-discovery and possibility.

This is very much a personal reading of the poem but I hope it gives you some ideas you like. (And excuse all typos and errors of expression.) :)

I don’t know what age you are or what you are writing for, but this is the main link for Rich on the Internet. http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/49 The IPL Literary Criticism page asks for anything else that can be found!

[Eager_Rose]

Hi Inez
THanks so much for ur reply. ITs helped me a lot.
Best wishes ;)

[Eager_Rose]

“The Mirror in Which
Two Are Seen as One”

1.

She is the one you call sister.
Her simplest act has glamor
as when she scales a fish the knife
flashes in her long fingers
no motion wasted or when
rapidly talking of love
she steel-wool burnishes
the battered kettle
.

Love apples cramp you sideways
with sudden emptiness
the cereals glutting you, the grains
ripe clusters picked by hand
Love: the refrigerator
with open door
the ripe steaks bleeding
their hearts out in plastic film
the whipped butter, the apricots
the sour leftovers

A crate is waiting in the orchard
For you to fill it
Your hands are raw with scraping
The sharp bark, the thorns
Of this succulent tree
Pick, pick, pick
this harvest is a failure
the juice runs down your cheekbones
like sweat or tears

2.

She is the one you call sister
you blaze like lighting about the room
flicker around her like fire
dazzle yourself in her wide eyes
listing her unfelt needs
thrusting the tenets of your life
into her hands

She moves through a world of India print
her body dappled
with softness, the paisley swells at her hip


walking the street in her cotton shift
.

buying fresh figs because you love them
photographing the getto because you took her there

Why are you crying dry up your tears
we are sisters
words fail you in the stare of her hunger
you hand her another book
scored by your pencil
you hand her a record
of two flutes and an India reciting

3.

Late summer nights the insects
fry in the yellowed lightglobe
your skin burns gold in its light
In this mirror, who are you? Dreams of the nunnery
with its discipline, the nursery
with its nurse, the hospital
where all the powerful ones are masked
the graveyard where you sit on the graves
of women who died in childbirth
and women who died at birth
Dreams of your sister’s birth
your mother dying in childbirth over and over
not knowing how to stop
bearing you over and over

your mother dead and you unborn
your two hands grasping your head
drawing it down against the blade of life
your nerves the nerves of a midwife
learning her trade

1971



The title: I think the title is about how the mirror is the world during the 20th century where two women are seen as one, where all women are treated in the same way, regardless of who they are.

Who is this sister? My interpretation is that “sister” refers to all women.

Women are described as beautiful and glamorous, beautiful objects.

Stanza one: Housework is combined with talk about love. How can I talk about this section?

The last stanza talks about women, women who died, women who suffer. This stanza is crucial, the most important in the whole poem. I need help with interpretation though.

The last bit of the last stanza is very visual and graphic, a baby trying to exit the world of the womb by itself. This baby is a female, the mother is dead.

What is the importance of the India print?