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In Memoriam: Adrienne RichTribute, Reading, Celebration Monday, April 16, 2012 : 7:00 – 9:00pmDeutsches Haus, Columbia University Adrienne Rich: poet, essayist, feminist, champion of social justice, teacher, friend.The Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University invites you to join in celebrating Adrienne Rich’s life, to mourn her passing, and to read her work, again. Hosted by Rosalind Morris, Yvette Christiansë and Julie Crawford.

In Memoriam: Adrienne Rich
Tribute, Reading, Celebration

Monday, April 16, 2012 : 7:00 – 9:00pm
Deutsches Haus, Columbia University

Adrienne Rich: poet, essayist, feminist, champion of social justice, teacher, friend.
The Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia University invites you to join in celebrating Adrienne Rich’s life, to mourn her passing, and to read her work, again.

Hosted by Rosalind Morris, Yvette Christiansë and Julie Crawford.

IN TRIBUTE TO ADRIENNE RICH (1929 - 2012): EAVAN BOLAND Adrienne Rich’s death has left us without the living presence of a great poet and a great spirit. What remains is an extraordinary body of work and a complex, stirring witness to what a poet can be in their own time. When I first read her poems I was barely out of my twenties. I lived in a suburban neighborhood in Dublin, my days meshed into the life of small children and household routines. I was a world away from Adrienne Rich’s world. And yet I took her poems with me from room to room, propping them against pots of tea and mugs of coffee. I read them and remembered them. And through the noise of dailyness, even then, I heard her voice clearly. I continue to hear her voice. I always will. The difference is that now I understand better what that voice means, and what it speaks of in contemporary poetry. To describe her as a feminist poet, or even as a political poet, may be accurate. It is also incomplete. Her true achievement has been to show that the ethical imagination is a responsibility and not an option. It is she, in both poetry and prose, who has pointed out the dangers of dividing the poem from its source in humane life and living memory. At the same time, she has shown that meticulous poetic craft can strengthen both conscience and citizenship, and be strengthened by them. This is how she has challenged and altered the poetic conversation in our time. And in ways which will last well beyond it. EAVAN BOLAND was born in Dublin. The author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry and nonfiction, she is a professor and the director of the Creative Writing program at Stanford University.

IN TRIBUTE TO ADRIENNE RICH (1929 - 2012): EAVAN BOLAND

Adrienne Rich’s death has left us without the living presence of a great poet and a great spirit. What remains is an extraordinary body of work and a complex, stirring witness to what a poet can be in their own time.

When I first read her poems I was barely out of my twenties. I lived in a suburban neighborhood in Dublin, my days meshed into the life of small children and household routines. I was a world away from Adrienne Rich’s world. And yet I took her poems with me from room to room, propping them against pots of tea and mugs of coffee. I read them and remembered them. And through the noise of dailyness, even then, I heard her voice clearly.

I continue to hear her voice. I always will. The difference is that now I understand better what that voice means, and what it speaks of in contemporary poetry. To describe her as a feminist poet, or even as a political poet, may be accurate. It is also incomplete.

Her true achievement has been to show that the ethical imagination is a responsibility and not an option. It is she, in both poetry and prose, who has pointed out the dangers of dividing the poem from its source in humane life and living memory. At the same time, she has shown that meticulous poetic craft can strengthen both conscience and citizenship, and be strengthened by them. This is how she has challenged and altered the poetic conversation in our time. And in ways which will last well beyond it.

EAVAN BOLAND was born in Dublin. The author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry and nonfiction, she is a professor and the director of the Creative Writing program at Stanford University.

IN TRIBUTE TO ADRIENNE RICH (1929 - 2012): ROSANNA WARREN “They’ve supplied us with pills / for bleeding, pills for panic. / Wash them down the sink,” wrote Rich in “5:30 A.M.” in Leaflets: Poems 1965–1968. “No one tells the truth about truth,” that poem continued. For most of her life as a poet, citizen, activist, and lover—and those roles were interconnected for Rich—she tried to resist moral anesthesia and to tell the truth as she perceived it. She made a weapon of the literal declarative sentence: “I am thinking how we can use what we have / to invent what we need,” states “Leaflets,” another early poem. The tone and method do not differ much in her later work: “We want to show ordinary life / We are dying to show it” (“Ritual Acts” in The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004). However tamped down, the literal never stays literal, certainly not in a poem by Rich: the bluntest statements rise into allegory. Rich rhymed “rage” and “page” in “Contradictions: Tracking Poems,” 1986. That figure gives a clue to both her power and her weakness. If her poems are sometimes sapped by an unreckoning self-righteousness, they are also blueprints for determined, often scathing ethical inquiry, insistence on justice, and celebration of same-sex love, and at their best they fight “the temptation to make a career of pain” (“Twenty-One Love Poems,” 1976). She is also, at odd moments, a poet of mystery and delicate recognitions who can see the equinox as “Time split like a fruit between dark and light” (“Equinox,” 2004). Her poems reflected the battles of her time but also led them, and helped to reinvent the language of protest. ROSANNA WARREN, the author of four collections of poetry, has received awards from the Academy of Arts and Letters and has won the Lamont Poetry Prize. She teaches at Boston University and lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

IN TRIBUTE TO ADRIENNE RICH (1929 - 2012): ROSANNA WARREN

“They’ve supplied us with pills / for bleeding, pills for panic. / Wash them down the sink,” wrote Rich in “5:30 A.M.” in Leaflets: Poems 1965–1968. “No one tells the truth about truth,” that poem continued. For most of her life as a poet, citizen, activist, and lover—and those roles were interconnected for Rich—she tried to resist moral anesthesia and to tell the truth as she perceived it. She made a weapon of the literal declarative sentence: “I am thinking how we can use what we have / to invent what we need,” states “Leaflets,” another early poem. The tone and method do not differ much in her later work: “We want to show ordinary life / We are dying to show it” (“Ritual Acts” in The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000–2004). However tamped down, the literal never stays literal, certainly not in a poem by Rich: the bluntest statements rise into allegory.

Rich rhymed “rage” and “page” in “Contradictions: Tracking Poems,” 1986. That figure gives a clue to both her power and her weakness. If her poems are sometimes sapped by an unreckoning self-righteousness, they are also blueprints for determined, often scathing ethical inquiry, insistence on justice, and celebration of same-sex love, and at their best they fight “the temptation to make a career of pain” (“Twenty-One Love Poems,” 1976). She is also, at odd moments, a poet of mystery and delicate recognitions who can see the equinox as “Time split like a fruit between dark and light” (“Equinox,” 2004). Her poems reflected the battles of her time but also led them, and helped to reinvent the language of protest.

ROSANNA WARREN, the author of four collections of poetry, has received awards from the Academy of Arts and Letters and has won the Lamont Poetry Prize. She teaches at Boston University and lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

IN TRIBUTE TO ADRIENNE RICH (1929 - 2012): HONOR MOORE A woman whom I considered immortal even when I met her, standing quiet, those dark eyes focused on me—we are at the old Manhattan Theatre Club on East 73rd Street and this is the first reading in a series I’m beginning: Adrienne Rich and Sonia Sanchez. It was 1972, and she had written this: A woman in the shape of a monster / a monster in the shape of a woman / the skies are full of them, and so she was who I wanted to invite, she and Sonia. How is it that a poet could so deeply express how I felt (a woman / a monster), could converse with that part of me that I had kept hidden, hidden out of fear, out of shame? The monster I was who was right then, even without my knowledge, being freed by her language, toward a dream of power and beauty? Her accent was unique, how her voice seemed to shape the words of her poems as if she were sculpting them as she read, right then. In the way of communities, we came to know each other—I remember, for instance, phoning to tell her that Judy Grahn would be reading at Westbeth that very night. And she came, and we all heard the California poet read a great poem we hadn’t known, “A Woman Is Talking to Death,”, and we all went out afterward, to a women’s restaurant in the village called Mother Courage. And I remember her 1970s readings, packed, standing room only, often in large rooms, even Battelle Chapel at Yale in the early 1990s. How often were they? Two or three times a year? More often? I longed for them, we all longed for them. Waiting for them was like waiting for a storm—for the wind before thunder that upends leaves so you see their silver undersides—we waited that way, preparing ourselves for the knowledge in the extraordinary new poem she was sure to read, knowledge that would surely change the way one thought, excavate the surface of who one was at that moment, unearth—you would realize this, leaving the hall in a throng—the woman you were becoming. This morning in Iowa, a woman friend, lending me her worn copy of A Will to Change: “I took it on a hike I made alone somewhere in the mountains of Virginia. Inside me was a will to change.” “And did you make that change?” “Yes, I did,” she answered, and all around her, the life she made decades ago as the result of that hike in the mountains, the book she carried. It was not like signing up, it was not like conversion, it was that Adrienne Rich’s language was a means by which one came to understand one’s own thinking, and to move forward into a life that would not have been so completely your own had you not encountered this great poet, that great woman. HONOR MOORE is a poet and the author of The Bishop’s Daughter. She lives in New York City and teaches at the New School and Columbia University. (Original photograph by Sissy Krock)

IN TRIBUTE TO ADRIENNE RICH (1929 - 2012): HONOR MOORE

A woman whom I considered immortal even when I met her, standing quiet, those dark eyes focused on me—we are at the old Manhattan Theatre Club on East 73rd Street and this is the first reading in a series I’m beginning: Adrienne Rich and Sonia Sanchez. It was 1972, and she had written this: A woman in the shape of a monster / a monster in the shape of a woman / the skies are full of them, and so she was who I wanted to invite, she and Sonia. How is it that a poet could so deeply express how I felt (a woman / a monster), could converse with that part of me that I had kept hidden, hidden out of fear, out of shame? The monster I was who was right then, even without my knowledge, being freed by her language, toward a dream of power and beauty? Her accent was unique, how her voice seemed to shape the words of her poems as if she were sculpting them as she read, right then.

In the way of communities, we came to know each other—I remember, for instance, phoning to tell her that Judy Grahn would be reading at Westbeth that very night. And she came, and we all heard the California poet read a great poem we hadn’t known, “A Woman Is Talking to Death,”, and we all went out afterward, to a women’s restaurant in the village called Mother Courage. And I remember her 1970s readings, packed, standing room only, often in large rooms, even Battelle Chapel at Yale in the early 1990s. How often were they? Two or three times a year? More often? I longed for them, we all longed for them. Waiting for them was like waiting for a storm—for the wind before thunder that upends leaves so you see their silver undersides—we waited that way, preparing ourselves for the knowledge in the extraordinary new poem she was sure to read, knowledge that would surely change the way one thought, excavate the surface of who one was at that moment, unearth—you would realize this, leaving the hall in a throng—the woman you were becoming.

This morning in Iowa, a woman friend, lending me her worn copy of A Will to Change: “I took it on a hike I made alone somewhere in the mountains of Virginia. Inside me was a will to change.” “And did you make that change?” “Yes, I did,” she answered, and all around her, the life she made decades ago as the result of that hike in the mountains, the book she carried. It was not like signing up, it was not like conversion, it was that Adrienne Rich’s language was a means by which one came to understand one’s own thinking, and to move forward into a life that would not have been so completely your own had you not encountered this great poet, that great woman.

HONOR MOORE is a poet and the author of The Bishop’s Daughter. She lives in New York City and teaches at the New School and Columbia University.

(Original photograph by Sissy Krock)

“Adrienne Rich’s poems are works you turn to when the fog of stress grows too thick and the static too loud, when the world seems cruel and senseless. Rich’s poems are windows thrown open, candles lit, the kettle lifted from the stove.”

Donna Seaman, from “Remembering Adrienne Rich” on Booklist’s Likely Stories blog

In Memory of Adrienne Rich

libraryjournal:

nationalbook:

Adrienne Rich’s history-making 1974 National Book Award acceptance speech

“We, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Alice Walker, together accept this award in the name of all the women whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world, and in the name of those who, like us, have been tolerated as token women in this culture, often at great cost and in great pain.”

Cheryl Strayed on Adrienne Rich’s ‘The Dream of a Common Language’

I’d read The Dream of a Common Language so often that I’d practically memorized it. In the previous few years, certain lines had become like incantations to me, words I’d chanted to myself through my sorrow and confusion. That book was a consolation, an old friend, and when I held it in my hands on my first night on the trail, I didn’t regret carrying it one iota—even though carrying it meant that I could do no more than hunch beneath its weight. It was true that The Pacific Crest Trail, Volume 1: California was now my bible, but The Dream of a Common Language was my religion.

I opened it up and read the first poem out loud, my voice rising above the sound of the wind battering the walls of my tent. I read it again and again and again. 

It was a poem called ‘Power.’

—An excerpt from Cheryl Strayed’s new memoir Wild: Lost and Found on the Pacific Crest Trail

Do you have readers who come up to you and say, “You’ve changed my life?”

Adrienne Rich: Yes, I do, and I usually say to them—which I also believe to be true—“You were changing your life and you read my book or you read that poem at a point where you could use it, and I’m really glad, but you were changing your life.” Somehow when we are in the process of making some kind of self-transformation—pushing ourselves out there further, maybe taking some risk that we never believed we would take before—sometimes a poem will come to us by some sort of magnetic attraction.

-from a 1994 interview with The Progressive