8. Turning the Wheel
YOUR NATIVE LAND, YOUR LIFE (1981–1985)
I. SOURCES
Sources
II. NORTH AMERICAN TIME
For the Record
North American Time
Education of a Novelist
Virginia 1906
Dreams Before Waking
When/Then
Upcountry
One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem
In the Wake of Home
What Was, Is; What Might Have Been, Might Be
For an Occupant
Emily Carr
Poetry: I
Poetry: II, Chicago
Poetry: III
Baltimore:a fragment from the Thirties
New York
Homage to Winter
Blue Rock
Yom Kippur 1984
Edges
III. CONTRADICTIONS: TRACKING POEMS
1. Look:this is Januarythe worst onslaught
2. Heart of cold.Bones of cold.Scalp of cold
3. My mouth hovers across your breasts
4. He slammed his hand across my faceand I
5. She is carrying my madnessand I dread her
6. Dear Adrienne:I’m calling you up tonight
7. Dear Adrienne,I feel signified by pain
8. I’m afraid of prison.Have been all these years.
9. Tearing but not yet torn:this page
10. Nightover the great and the little worlds
11. I came out of the hospital like a woman
12. Violence as purification:the one idea.
13. Trapped in one idea, you can’t have your feelings,
14. Lately in my dreams I hear long sentences
15. You who think I find words for everything,
16. It’s true, these last few years I’ve lived
17. I have backroads I taketo places
18. The problem, unstated till now, is how
19. If to feel is to be unreliable
20. The tobacco fields lie fallowthe migrant pickers
21. The cat-tails blaze in the cornersunflowers
22. In a bald skull sits our friendin a helmet
23. You know the Government must have pushed them to settle,
24. Someone said to me:It’s just that we don’t
25. Did anyone ever know who we were
26. You:air-drivenreftfrom the tuber-bitten soil
27. The Tolstoyansthe Afro-American slaves
28. This high summer we love will pour its light
29. You who think I find words for everything
TIME’S POWER (1985–1988)
Solfeggietto
This
Love Poem
Negotiations
In a Classroom
The Novel
A Story
In Memoriam: D.K.
Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest
SleepwalkingNext to Death
Letters in the Family
The Desert as Garden of Paradise
Delta
6/21
For an Album
Dreamwood
Walking Down the Road
The Slides
Harpers Ferry
One Life
Divisions of Labor
Living Memory
Turning
AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD (1988–1991)
I. AN ATLAS OF THE DIFFICULT WORLD
I. A dark woman, head bent, listening for something
II. Here is a map of our country:
III. Two five-pointed star-shaped glass candleholders, …
IV. Late summers, early autumns, you can see something that binds
V. Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin
VI. A potato explodes in the oven.Poetry and famine:
VII. (The Dream-Site) Some rooftop, water-tank looming, street-racket strangely quelled
VIII. He thought there would be a limit and that it would stop him. He depended on that:
IX. On this earth, in this life, as I read your story, you’re lonely.
X. Soledad. = f. Solitude, loneliness, homesickness; lonely retreat.
XI. One night on Monterey Bay the death-freeze of the century:
XII. What homage will be paid to a beauty built to last
II.
She
That Mouth
Marghanita
Olivia
Eastern War Time
1. Memory lifts her smoky mirror:1943,
2. Girl between home and school,what is that girl
3. How telegrams used to come:ring
4. What the grown-ups can’t speak ofwould you push
5. A young girl knows she is young and meant to live
6. A girl wanders with a boy into the woods
7. A woman of sixtydriving
8. A woman wired in memories
9. Streets closed, emptied by forceGuns at corners
10. Memory says:Want to do right? Don’t count on me.
Tattered Kaddish
Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud
I. Through Corralitos under rolls of cloud
II. Showering after ’flu; stripping the bed;
III. If you know who died in that bed, do you know
IV. That light of outrage is the light of history
V. She who died on that bed sees it her way:
For a Friend in Travail
1948: Jews
Two Arts
1. I’ve redone you by daylight.
2. Raise it up there and it will
Darklight
I. Early day.Grey the air.
II. When heat leaves the walls at last
Final Notations
DARK FIELDS OF THE REPUBLIC (1991–1995)
WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE
What Kind of Times Are These
In Those Years
To the Days
Miracle Ice Cream
Rachel
Amends
Calle Visión
1. Not what you thought:just a turn-off
2. Calle Visiónsand in your teeth
3. Lodged in the difficult hotel
4. Calle Visiónyour heart beats on unbroken
5. Ammonia
6. The repetitive motions of slaughtering
7. You can call on beauty still and it will leap
8. In the roomin the house
9. In the black net
10. On the road there is a house
Reversion
Revolution in Permanence (1953, 1993)
THEN OR NOW
Food Packages: 1947
Innocence: 1945
Sunset, December, 1993
Deportations
And Now
Sending Love
Voice
Sending love:Molly sends it
Sending love is harmless
Terrence years ago
Take
Late Ghazal
Six Narratives
1. You drew up the story of your life
2. You drew up a story about me
3. You were telling a story about women to young men
4. You were telling a story about love
5. I was telling you a story about love
6. You were telling a story about war
From Piercéd Darkness
INSCRIPTIONS
One:comrade
Two:movement
Three:origins
Four:history
Five:voices
Six:edgelit
MIDNIGHT SALVAGE (1995–1998)
The Art of Translation
For an Anniversary
Midnight Salvage
Char
Modotti
Shattered Head
1941
Letters to a Young Poet
Camino Real
Plaza Street and Flatbush
Seven Skins
“Th
e Night Has a Thousand Eyes”
Rusted Legacy
A Long Conversation
FOX (1998–2000)
Victory
Veterans Day
For This
Regardless
Signatures
Nora’s Gaze
Architect
Fox
Messages
Fire
Twilight
Octobrish
Second Sight
Grating
Noctilucent Clouds
If Your Name Is on the List
1999
Terza Rima
Four Short Poems
Rauschenberg’s Bed
Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot
Ends of the Earth
THE SCHOOL AMONG THE RUINS (2000–2004)
I.
Centaur’s Requiem
Equinox
Tell Me
For June, in the Year 2001
The School Among the Ruins
This evening let’s
Variations on Lines from a Canadian Poet
Delivered Clean
The Eye
There Is No One Story and One Story Only
II.
USonian Journals 2000
III. TERRITORY SHARED
Address
Transparencies
Livresque
Collaborations
Ritual Acts
Point in Time
IV. ALTERNATING CURRENT
Sometimes I’m back in that city
No bad dreams.Night, the bed, the faint clockface.
Take one, take two
What’s suffered in laughterin aroused afternoons
A deluxe blending machine
As finally by wind or grass
When we are shaken out
V.
Memorize This
The Painter’s House
After Apollinaire & Brassens
Slashes
Trace Elements
Bract
VI. DISLOCATIONS: SEVEN SCENARIOS
1 Still learning the word
2 In a vast dystopic space the small things
3 City and world: this infection drinks like a drinker
4 For recalcitrancy of attitude
5 Faces in the mesh: defiance or disdain
6 Not to get up and go back to the drafting table
7 Tonight someone will sleep in a stripped apartment
VII.
Five O’Clock, January 2003
Wait
Don’t Take Me
To Have Written the Truth
Screen Door
VIII. TENDRIL
Tendril
TELEPHONE RINGING IN THE LABYRINTH (2004–2006)
I.
Voyage to the Denouement
Calibrations
Skeleton Key
Wallpaper
In Plain Sight
Behind the Motel
Melancholy Piano (extracts)
II.
Archaic
Long After Stevens
Improvisation on Lines from Edwin Muir’s “Variations on a Time Theme”
Rhyme
Hotel
Three Elegies
I. Late Style
II. As Ever
III. Fallen Figure
Hubble Photographs: After Sappho
This Is Not the Room
Unknown Quantity
Tactile Value
Midnight, the Same Day
I. When the sun seals my eyes the emblem
II. Try to rest now, says a voice
Even Then Maybe
Director’s Notes
Rereading The Dead Lecturer
III.
Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender, or Judged Unfit to Send
IV.
If/As Though
Time Exposures
I. Glance into glittering moisture
II. Is there a doctor in the house
III. They’d say she was humorless
IV. When I stretched out my legs beyond your wishful thinking
V. You’ve got ocean through sheet glass brandy and firelog
The University Reopens as the Floods Recede
Via Insomnia
A Burning Kangaroo
Ever, Again
V.
Draft #2006
VI.
Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth
TONIGHT NO POETRY WILL SERVE (2007–2010)
I.
Waiting for Rain, for Music
Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time
Benjamin Revisited
Innocence
Domain
Fracture
Turbulence
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
II.
Scenes of Negotiation
III.
From Sickbed Shores
IV. AXEL AVÁKAR
Axel Avákar
Axel: backstory
Axel, in thunder
I was there, Axel
Axel, darkly seen, in a glass house
V.
Ballade of the Poverties
Emergency Clinic
Confrontations
Circum/Stances
Winterface
Quarto
Don’t Flinch
Black Locket
Generosity
VI.
You, Again
Powers of Recuperation
LATER POEMS (2010–2012)
Itinerary
For the Young Anarchists
Fragments of an Opera
Liberté
Teethsucking Bird
Undesigned
Suspended Lines
Tracings
From Strata
Endpapers
Notes on the Poems
Index of Titles and First Lines
INTRODUCTION
BY CLAUDIA RANKINE
In answer to the question “Does poetry play a role in social change?” Adrienne Rich once answered:
Yes, where poetry is liberative language, connecting the fragments within us, connecting us to others like and unlike ourselves, replenishing our desire…. [I]n poetry words can say more than they mean and mean more than they say. In a time of frontal assaults both on language and on human solidarity, poetry can remind us of all we are in danger of losing—disturb us, embolden us out of resignation.
There are many great poets, but not all of them alter the ways in which we understand the world we live in; not all of them suggest that words can be held responsible. Remarkably, Adrienne Rich did this and continues to do this for generations of readers. In her Collected Poems 1950–2012 we have a chronicle of over a half century of what it means to risk the self in order to give the self.
Rich’s desire for a transformative writing that would invent new ways to be, to see, and to speak drew me to her work in the early 1980s while I was a student at Williams College. Midway through a cold and snowy semester in the Berkshires, I read for the first time James Baldwin’s 1962 The Fire Next Time and two collections by Rich, her 1969 Leaflets and her 1971–1972 Diving into the Wreck. In Baldwin’s text I underlined the following: “Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself—that is to say, risking oneself.”
Rich’s interrogation of the “guarding” of systems was the subject of everything she wrote in the years leading up to my first encounter with her work. Leaflets, Diving into the Wreck, and The Dream of a Common Language were all examples of her interrogation, as were her other works, all the way to her final poems in 2012. And though I did not have the critic Helen Vendler’s experience upon encountering Rich—“Four years after she published her first book, I read it in almost disbelieving
wonder; someone my age was writing down my life…. Here was a poet who seemed, by a miracle, a twin: I had not known till then how much I had wanted a contemporary and a woman as a speaking voice of life”—I was immediately drawn to Rich’s interest in what echoes past the silences in a life that wasn’t necessarily my life.
In my copy of Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken,” the faded yellow highlighter still remains recognizable on pages after more than thirty years: “Both the victimization and the anger experienced by women are real, and have real sources, everywhere in the environment, built into society, language, the structures of thought.” As a nineteen-year-old, I read in both Rich and Baldwin a twinned dissatisfaction with systems invested in a single, dominant, oppressive narrative. My initial understanding of feminism and racism came from these two writers in the same weeks and months.
Rich claimed that Baldwin was the “first writer I read who suggested that racism was poisonous to white as well as destructive to Black people” (“Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet” [1984]). It was Rich who suggested to me that silence, too, was poisonous and destructive to our social interactions and self-knowledge. Her understanding that the ethicacy of our personal relationships was dependent on the ethics of our political and cultural systems was demonstrated not only in her poetry but also in her essays, interviews, and in conversations like the extended one she conducted with the poet and essayist Audre Lorde.
Despite the vital friendship between Lorde and Rich, or perhaps because of it, both poets were able to question their own everyday practices of collusion with the very systems that oppressed them. As self-identified lesbian feminists, they openly negotiated the difficulties of their very different racial and economic realities. Stunningly, they showed us that, if you listen closely enough, language “is no longer personal,” as Rich writes in “Meditations for a Savage Child,” but stains and is stained by the political.
In the poem “Hunger” (1974–1975), which is dedicated to Audre Lorde, Rich writes, “I’m wondering / whether we even have what we think we have / … even our intimacies are rigged with terror. / Quantify suffering? My guilt at least is open, / I stand convicted by all my convictions—you, too …” And as if in the form of an answer, Lorde wrote in “The Uses Of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” an essay published in 1981, “I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action.”
By my late twenties, the early 1990s, I was in graduate school at Columbia University and came across Rich’s recently published An Atlas of the Difficult World. I approached the volume thinking I knew what it would hold but found myself transported by Rich’s profound exploration of ethical loneliness. Rich called forward voices created in a precarious world. And though the term “ethical loneliness” would come to me years later from the work of the critic Jill Stauffer, I understood Rich to be drawing into her stanzas the voices of those who have been, in the words of Stauffer, “abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard.”