THIS IS NOT THE ROOM
U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney, on NBC’s Meet the Press, September 16, 2001: “we also have to work, though, sort of, the dark side . . . use any means at our disposal, basically, to achieve our objective.”
REREADING The Dead Lecturer
See LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), The Dead Lecturer: Poems (New York: Grove, 1967).
LETTERS CENSORED, SHREDDED, RETURNED TO SENDER OR JUDGED UNFIT TO SEND
Passages in quotes are for Giuseppe Fiori, Antonio Gramsci: Life of a Revolutionary, trans. Tom Nairn (New York: Verso, 1990), pp. 31, 239; Antonio Gramsci, Prison Letters, ed. and trans. Hamish Henderson (London: Pluto Press, 1996), p. 135; and Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigeig, trans. Joseph A. Buttigeig and Antonio Callari, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), I, p. 213.
DRAFT #2006: VI
“Out of sight, out of mind.” See Carolyn Jones, “Battle of the Beds,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 2005, p. A-1.
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
WAITING FOR RAIN, FOR MUSIC
“Send my roots rain.” Gerard Manley Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins: Selections, 1986, ed. Catherine Phillips, The Oxford Authors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 183.
“A struggle at the roots of the mind.” Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, Eng.: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 212.
READING THE ILIAD (AS IF) FOR THE FIRST TIME
“For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors”: Simone Weil, The Iliad; or, The Poem of Force, (1940), trans. Mary McCarthy (Wallingford, Pa.: Pendle Hill, 1956), p. 3.
“Delusion / a daughter.” See Homer, The Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 394–395, bk. 19, lines 91–130.
“Horses turn away their heads / weeping.” Homer, pp. 365–366, bk. 17, lines 426–440.
I WAS THERE, AXEL
“The Blue Ghazals.” See Adrienne Rich, The Will to Change (New York: Norton, 1971), p. 24.
BALLADE OF THE POVERTIES
This revival of an old form owes inspiration to François Villon, The Poems of François Villon, ed. and trans. Galway Kinnell (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977).
BLACK LOCKET
“It lies in ‘the way of seeing the world’ . . .”: Laura Betti, ed., Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Future Life (Italy: Associazione “Fondo Pier Paolo Pasolini,” 1989), pp. 19–20.
GENEROSITY
The books mentioned are James Scully, Raging Beauty: Selected Poems (Washington, D.C.: Azul Editions, 1994), and René Char, Lettera Amorosa (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), with illustrations by Georges Braque and Jean Arp.
POWERS OF RECUPERATION
“the massive figure on unrest’s verge.” See Melencolia I, a 1514 engraving by Albrecht Dürer. The “I” is thought to refer to “Melencolia Imaginativa,” one of three types of melancholy described by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535).
Acknowledgments
* * *
Some of the new poems included appeared in the following print and online journals:
Xcp: Cross-Cultural Poetics: “For the Young Anarchists”
Red Wheelbarrow: “Teethsucking Bird”
Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine: “Liberté”
Granta: “Endpapers”
Tin House: “From Strata”
Paris Review: “Itinerary”
A Public Space: “Tracings”
Kweli Journal: “Undesigned,” “Suspended Lines”
Index of Titles and First Lines
* * *
A child’s hand smears a wall the reproof is bitter, 411
A clear night if the mind were clear, 82
A conversation begins, 40
A crime of nostalgia, 477
A dark woman, head bent, listening for something, 213
A fogged hill-scene on an enormous continent, 37
A life hauls itself uphill, 304
All that can be unknown is stored in the black screen of a broken, 366
All winter you went to bed early, drugging yourself on War and, 189
A locomotive pushing through snow in the mountains, 423
Alternating Current, 394
A man lies under a car half bare, 420
A man walking on the street, 190
Amends, 252
An idea declared itself between us, 338
And Now, 266
And now as you read these poems, 266
Ankles shackled, 500
Archaic, 421
Architect, 340
A room papered with clippings, 414
Art of Translation, The, 291
Atlas of the Difficult World, An, 213
at the oak table under the ceiling fan, 234
A white woman dreaming of innocence, 137
A wild patience has taken me this far, 75
A woman of the citizen party—what’s that—, 486
Axel Avákar, 464
Ballade of the Poverties, 472
Baltimore: a fragment from the Thirties, 154
Behind the Motel, 420
Black Locket, 484
Blue Rock, 157
Burn me some music Send my roots rain I’m swept, 453
Burnt by lightning nevertheless, 493
Calibrations, 412
Calle Visión, 253
Call me Sebastian, arrows sticking all over, 482
Camino Real, 310
Cartographies of Silence, 40
Caustic implacable, 474
Centaur’s Requiem, 369
Char, 299
Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest, 192
Circum/Stances, 477
Citizen/Alien/Night/Mare, 382
Coast to Coast, 73
Cold wit leaves me cold, 421
Confrontations, 476
Contradictions: Tracking Poems, 164
—Could you see me laboring over this, 435
Dangerous of course to draw, 264
Darklight, 240
Death, goodlooking as only a skeleton can get, 485
Delta, 199
Deportations, 265
Despair falls, 140
Director’s Notes, 432
Dislocations: Seven Scenarios, 397
Diving into the Wreck, 14
Doves bleat, crows repeat, 501
Draft #2006, 443
Dreams Before Waking, 140
Dreamwood, 201
Early day. Grey the air, 240
Edges, 163
Emergency Clinic, 474
Endpapers, 511
Ends of the Earth, 366
Equinox, 371
Even if we knew the children were all asleep, 153
Europe 1953, 85
Exceptional, 91
Final Notations, 243
Fire, 344
First having read the book of myths, 14
Food Packages: 1947, 262
For a Friend in Travail, 242
For a Sister, 23
For Ethel Rosenberg, 85
For Memory, 80
For the Dead, 24
For the Record, 130
For the Young Anarchists, 495
For This, 336
Four Short Poems, 361
Fox, 342
Fragments of an Opera, 496
Frame, 105
From 1964: a color snapshot: you, 143
from crush and splinter, 430
From shores of sickness: skin of the globe stretches and snakes, 461
From Sickbed Shores, 461
From Strata, 507
From the Prison House, 12
From you I want more than I’ve ever asked, 249
Genero
sity, 485
Grandmothers, 95
Grating, 346
Hail-spurting sky sun, 352
Harpers Ferry, 202
Heroines, 91
Homage to Winter, 155
Hot stink of skunk, 310
How a bed once dressed with a kindly quilt becomes, 363
Hubble Photographs: After Sappho, 426
Hunger, 37
I dreamed I called you on the telephone, 24
If I’ve reached for your lines (I have), 336
If the road’s a frayed ribbon strung through dunes, 511
If you have taken this rubble for my past, 199
If Your Name Is on the List, 351
If your name is on the list of judges, 351
I love the infinity of these silent spaces, 343
Imagine a city where nothing’s, 317
In a Classroom, 188
Incipience, 7
I needed fox Badly I needed, 342
In Memoriam: D.K., 190
Innocence: 1945, 263
In paradise every, 402
In Plain Sight, 417
Inscriptions, 273
Integrity, 75
In their own way, by their own lights, 25
In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand, 201
in the old city incendiaries abound, 344
In the sleepless sleep of dawn, in the dreamless dream, 163
In Those Years, 248
In those years, people will say, we lost track, 248
I sat down facing the steep place where, 364
Itinerary, 493
I trust none of them. Only my existence, 23
It’s happened already while we were still, 265
It should be the most desired sight of all, 426
It’s June and summer’s height, 200
It’s not new, this condition, just for awhile, 476
It wasn’t as if our lives depended on it—, 502
it will not be simple, it will not be long, 243
Late night on the underside a spectral glare, 349
Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender or Judged Unfit to Send, 435
Letters to a Young Poet, 306
Liberté, 500
Little as I knew you I know you: little as you knew me you, 273
Living in the earth-deposits of our history, 33
Living Memory, 206
Long After Stevens, 423
Long Conversation, A, 319
Look: this is January the worst onslaught, 164
Lurid, garish, gash, 455
Marghanita, 234
Medical textbooks propped in a dusty window, 154
Meditations for a Savage Child, 25
Messages, 343
Metallic slam on a moonless night, 403
Midnight Salvage, 293
Miracle Ice Cream, 250
MIRACLE’S truck comes down the little avenue, 250
Mirror in Which Two Are Seen As One, The, 9
Modotti, 302
Mute it utters ravage guernican, 480
My neighbor moving, 417
Negotiations, 187
Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon, 34
Nights like this: on the cold apple-bough, 252
Noctilucent Clouds, 349
North American Time, 132
Not having worn, 346
not talk, 378
Nothing he had done before, 340
Not what you thought: just a turn-off, 253
Novel, The, 189
of polished tables lit with medalled, 428
Old words: trust fidelity, 80
One Kind of Terror: A Love Poem, 143
Open the book of tales you knew by heart, 206
Origins and History of Consciousness, 34
Out in this desert we are testing bombs, 3
Over the hills in Shutesbury, Leverett, 98
Overthrow. And make new, 433
Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff, 58
Phenomenology of Anger, The, 18
Poetry: I, 151
Poetry: II, Chicago, 152
Poetry: III, 153
Powdered milk, chocolate bars, canned fruit, tea, 262
Power, 33
Powers of Recuperation, 486
Quarto, 482
Rachel, 251
Rauschenberg’s Bed, 336
Reading the Iliad (As If) for the First Time, 455
Regardless, 338
Rereading The Dead Lecturer, 433
Reversion, 260
Rhyme, 424
Ritual Acts, 391
Rusted Legacy, 317
Saw you walking barefoot, 457
Scene One: Ales, Sardinia, 19—, 496
Scenes of Negotiation, 458
School Among the Ruins, The, 374
Scrape a toxic field with a broken hoe, 504
Screen Door, 403
Seven Skins, 313
Shattered Head, 304
She is the one you call sister, 9
She tunes her guitar for Landstuhl, 412
Should blue air in its purity let you disdain, 441
Six Narratives, 267
Sixteen years. The narrow, rough-gullied backroads, 113
6/21, 200
Sleep horns of a snail, 194
Sleepwalking Next to Death, 194
Solfeggietto, 183
Someday if someday comes we will agree, 187
Someone at a table under a brown metal lamp, 151
Something spreading underground won’t speak to us, 333
Sometimes I’m back in that city, 394
Sources, 113
Spirit of Place, The, 98
Spring nights you pillow your head on a sack, 429
Still learning the word, 397
Sunset, December, 1993, 264
Suppose we came back as ghosts asking the unasked questions, 443
Suspended Lines, 504
Tactile Value, 430
Talking of poetry, hauling the books, 188
Tattered Kaddish, 236
Taurean reaper of the wild apple field, 236
Teaching the first lesson and the last, 374
Teethsucking Bird, 501
Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth, 448
Tell Me, 372
Tell me, why way toward dawn the body, 372
Tendril, 404
Terza Rima, 352
That Mouth, 233
The autumn feels slowed down, 58
“The beauty of it was the guilt, 263
The clouds and the stars didn’t wage this war, 130
The engineer’s story of hauling coal, 381
The freedom of the wholly mad, 18
The I you know isn’t me, you said, truthtelling liar, 465
The leafbud straggles forth, 57
The moon, 361
The ornament hung from my neck is a black locket, 484
There are days when housework seems the only, 73
There is bracken there is the dark mulberry, 299
There Is No One Story and One Story Only, 381
There’s a girl born in abrupt August light, 251
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows, 247
There’s the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted, 472
The thirtieth of November, 67
This, 186
This chair delivered yesterday, 505
This Evening Let’s, 378
This Is Not the Room, 428
This is the girl’s mouth, the taste, 233
This woman/ the heart of the matter, 260
Through Corralitos Under Rolls of Cloud, 237
Time split like a fruit between dark and light, 370
To have seen you exactly, once, 291
To live, to lie awake, 7
Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, 457
To the Days, 249
Toward the Solstice, 67
Tracings, 505
Transit, 78
Transparencies, 389
Trying to Talk with a Man, 3
Trying to tell you how, 5
Twenty-one Love Poems, 45
Two green-webbed chairs, 192
Underneath my lids another eye has opened, 12
Under this blue, 507
Undesigned, 502
University Reopens as the Floods Recede, The, 441
Unknown Quantity, 429
Upper Broadway, 57
Up skyward through a glazed rectangle I, 293
Usonian Journals 2000, 382
Victory, 333
Virginia 1906, 137
Vision, A, 108
Voyage to the Denouement, 411
Wait, 402
Waiting for Rain, for Music, 453
Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot, 364
Walk along back of the library, 313
Walking by the fence but the house, 424
Walking from violence: the surgeon’s probe left in the foot, 242
Wallpaper, 414
—warm bloom of blood in the child’s arterial tree, 319
We are asking for books, 391
We had no petnames, no diminutives for you, 95
Whatever a poet is, 152
Whatever we hunger for, 495
What is a Jew in solitude?, 159
What Is Possible, 82
What Kind of Times Are These, 247
What’s kept. What’s lost. A snap decision, 149
What Was, Is; What Might Have Been, Might Be, 149
When I meet the skier she is always, 78
When my dreams showed signs, 132
When We Dead Awaken, 5
Where do I get this landscape? Two river-roads, 202
Wherever in this city, screens flicker, 45
Why does the outstretched finger of home, 404
Winterface, 480
Winter twilight. She comes out of the lab-, 105
Woman Dead in Her Forties, A, 61
Yom Kippur 1984, 159
You: a woman too old, 155
You don’t want a harsh outcry here, 432
You drew up the story of your life I was in that story, 267
Your breasts/ sliced-off The scars, 61
Your chunk of lapis-lazuli shoots its stain, 157
Your footprints of light on sensitive paper, 302
Your hooves drawn together underbelly, 369
Your photograph won’t do you justice, 306
Your windfall at fifteen your Steinway grand, 183
You. There, with your gazing eyes, 108
You who can be silent in twelve languages, 448
Z: I hated that job but You’d have taken it too if you’d had a, 458
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by The Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 2011, 2007,