Queer Brilliance : Adrienne Rich : Fierce Visionary Poet and Gender Anarchist

 

Considering the literary canon of Lesbian writers, perhaps none have had the pervasive impact and influence of poet Adrienne Rich, who entered the scene early, but continued to learn and evolve as she gained recognition and accolades for her modulated, angry, confrontational, articulate, yet subtle verse. Not that Rich only addressed defiant feminist gender politics. Much of her poetry has a reflective, wistful feel about it. No one (who gave it much thought) would accuse her of monotony or polemics. Married to Harvard economist Alfred H. Conrad in 1953, they had three sons before the epiphany of her actual orientation was fully realized, the territory of her writing symbiotic with her journey of self-discovery. 

Adrienne Rich won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize for A Change of World, after graduating from Radcliffe College in 1951. It would be only the first of many. The contest judge that year was none other than W.H. Auden, whose “blessing” would help to validate her controversial poetry in the years to come. Had Auden not acknowledged the quality and sophistication of her craftsmanship, critics might have facilely dismissed her writing as feminist invective. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952, traveling to Europe and publishing The Diamond Cutters in 1955. In 1963, a third, breakthrough  collection, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, appeared, and brought her attention at the national level. 

In 1968 Rich became a teacher at City College of New York, and went on to also lecture and serve as adjunct professor at Swarthmore and Columbia University of the Arts. At this time her poetry evolved and sharpened, increasingly informed by a sense of social activism and a dialectic of gender and its effect on the human spirit. Rich’s poetry was sparked by obsessive questioning and curiosity, a need to challenge presuppositions of a patriarchal hierarchy:

“There is a cop who is both prowler and father:

he comes from your block, grew up with your brothers,

…he has access to machinery that could kill you.”

Rape by Adrienne Rich, from Diving into the Wreck

Whether you agree with her or not, Rich has never lacked the courage of her convictions. She never shied away from describing the blacker, more oppressive side of gender politics. And while she gradually and openly embraced her lesbian identity, much of her written and public manifesto was on behalf of all women, regardless of their individual orientation. Her essay, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," remains a compelling, unsettling and (forgive the expression) seminal treatise on how deeply ingrained the diminished role of women in American culture can be. 

When Diving into the Wreck was published in 1974, she refused the prestigious National Book Award, joining with sister poets Audre Lorde and Alice Walker, accepting it instead, on behalf of “all silenced women.” In 1976 she openly declared her lesbianism, moving in with partner Michelle Cliff (poet and novelist) with whom she has lived to this day. Like many GLBT artists born earlier in the twentieth century, the fact of her same gender sexual attraction became apparent after a gradual awakening of personal and ideological sensibilities. The victim of an unenlightened society, she probably fell prey to the zeitgeist that dismissed queer bonding as either degeneracy or insanity, and ironically, continues to do so. 

Throughout her career, Adrienne Rich as continued to publish intelligent, stirring, iconoclastic poetry and prose (Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution; Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), incorporated into Dream of a Common Language (1978), A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) The Fact of a Doorframe (2001) On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (1979). An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) winning numerous awards and rocking the boat. In 1997 she refused the National Medal of Arts on ethical grounds, explaining, "[Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage."

 As we have already seen, Rich was not adverse to making political statements by rejecting particular prizes and citations. Among the many she did accept were : the inaugural, 1986 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 1992 Poets' Prize, the 1997 Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for School Among the Ruins, and the 2006 National Book Foundation (presenter of the National Book Awards) "Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters."