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Adrienne Rich
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Adrienne Cecile Rich (born May 16, 1929, in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the [20th] century" .
951, the year she graduated from Radcliffe College, Adrienne Rich received the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, which led to the publication of her first book, A Change of World.
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Encyclopedia
Adrienne Cecile Rich (born May 16, 1929, in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the [20th] century" .
Career
In 1951, the year she graduated from Radcliffe College, Adrienne Rich received the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, which led to the publication of her first book, A Change of World. The contest judge for that year, poet W. H. Auden, wrote an introduction to this volume. The following year, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship and traveled to Europe, then married Harvard University economist Alfred H. Conrad in 1953. Three years later, she published her second volume, The Diamond Cutters, yet it wasn't until her third volume, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, which appeared in 1963, that she gained national prominence.
In 1966, she moved with her family, which now included three sons, to New York City, and became increasingly involved in the sociopolitical activism of the day. Her husband took a teaching position at City College of New York where, in 1968, Adrienne joined the staff as a writing instructor with the pre-baccalaureate program SEEK. In the late sixties, early seventies years Rich also held positions of lecturer and adjunct professor at both Swarthmore College and Columbia University School of the Arts. Her books from this period, Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and Will to Change (1971), reflect an evolving, expanding sense of poetic form and social engagement. Rich became active in the women's liberation movement from this point forward. In 1974, her collection Diving Into the Wreck received the National Book Award for Poetry; Rich, however, refused the award individually, instead joining with two other female poets (Alice Walker and Audre Lorde) to accept it on behalf of all silenced women.
Rich's feminist position crystallized in her self-declaration as a lesbian, in 1976, the year she published her controversial but groundbreaking volume Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution; the pamphlet Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), which was incorporated into the following year's Dream of a Common Language (1978), marks the first direct treatment of lesbian desire and sexuality in her work. The subsequent A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and some of the late poems in The Fact of a Doorframe (2001) represent the capstone of this philosophical and political position. During this period, Rich also wrote a number of important essays, including "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," some of which were republished in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (1979).
Rich's poetry of the 1980s and 1990s cast a broader net, once again exploring the themes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but with greater acuteness and range. The award-winning volume An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) in particular map out discursive spaces engaging private and public histories, and offer powerful examples of ethically engaged, socially committed lyric poetry.
Rich refused the National Medal of Arts in 1997 stating that "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration." Another quote from the same speech outlines her view of poetry: "[Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage."
As of 1999, Rich was living in Santa Cruz, California, with her partner, novelist, poet and academic Michelle Cliff. The two have been living together since 1976.
Among her many awards are 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".
Works
- A Change of World, 1951
- The Diamond Cutters, 1956
- Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, 1963
- Necessities of Life, 1966
- Leaflets, 1969
- Will to Change, 1971
- Diving Into the Wreck, 1972
- Of Woman Born: Motherhood, 1976
- Twenty-One Love Poems, 1974-1976, published 1977
- 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
- Women, 2008
Essays:
External links
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- - interview by Michael Klein, The Boston Phoenix, 1999.
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- essay from November 18, 2006 ed. of The Guardian, with the subtitle: "In our dark times we need poetry more than ever, argues Adrienne Rich"
- Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
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