Online Journal Publishes Special
Issue On Adrienne Rich*
Review
of The Critical Flame: A
Journal of Literature and Culture,
23 March 2015 by Clara B. Jones
Rating: 3 stars
Keywords: Literary
and Critical Essays
According
to the webpage of the progressive, online venue, The
Critical Flame: A Journal of Literature and Culture,
its Mission is “to
encourage intelligent public discussion about literature and culture
through long-form literary and critical essays covering a wide range
of topics”. Surfing the site, essays group into three categories:
Verse, Fiction, and Non-fiction with contributions on subjects as
varied as Vivian Gornick's new memoir, Nicola Griffith's recent novel
on female identity in art, and Mark Doty's 2014 poetry collection,
Deep Lane.
Most of the essays I skimmed were fewer than twelve paragraphs long,
written in a style reminiscent of short academic articles but without
formal notation or distractingly technical language.
The
journal's webpage informs us that “between May 2014 and April 2015,
Critical Flame
dedicated its pages to women writers and writers of color”, and one
project was the Special Issue, “The enduring power of Adrienne
Rich”, a feminist and political poet who died in 2012 at the age of
82. In her 1983 book, Writing
Like A Woman, the
feminist poetry critic, Alicia Ostriker, said, “Rich is the
strongest woman poet in the country, and a major influence.” Many
readers of this review will be familiar with Rich's work,
particularly, the volumes, The
Will To Change (1971)
and Diving Into The Wreck
(1973), and her first book, A
Change Of World (1951),
was awarded the Yale Younger Poets' Award by W.H. Auden.
This
Special Issue includes an Introduction by the journal's Founding
Editor, Daniel E. Pritchard, one interview, seven essays and one
contribution presenting brief personal testimonies by six female
poets on the “lasting influence of Adrienne Rich”. I strongly
identified with these unevenly-written pieces because, in the 1970's,
Rich's poetry, and the writing of Francoise Giroud, changed the
direction of my life. Three of the seven essays are contributed by
men, and, two of these address technical aspects of Rich's poems
(syntax and word placement) in a relatively detached manner while the
third essay by a man (discussed below) is the most conventionally
academic in the issue. I highlight this point because, except for the
Introduction, the content of texts is, on balance, gendered in the
sense that female contributors write in a personal, intimate voice.
The reader is encouraged to see Ostriker's book, Stealing
The Language (1986),
for a detailed treatment of differences between male and female
writing.
“The
enduring power of Adrienne Rich” includes a 2001 translation of an
interview between Rich and the Chilean poet, Magdalena Edwards,
recorded during a conference, Chile
Poesia, in Santiago. The
interview is accompanied by an 8 minute video (in color), and both
documents will serve scholars and other interested readers with
archival evidence of Rich's knowledge of and commitment to political
initiatives designed to highlight and to combat oppression. Ostriker
(Writing Like A Woman)
considers Rich “a poet of ideas” whose poems and prose “depend
on the assumption that the writer's mind exists to embody the
implicit meaning of a culture at a moment in time”, a narrative
privileging social conditions. Indeed, by the early 1970s, when the
formerly-married mother of three sons announced her homosexuality,
her themes addressed self-revelation, feminism, love between females,
war, patriarchy, anger, and capitalism. Some, like the poetry critic,
Helen Vendler, consider Rich's work after 1973 to be, primarily,
“Sociology” and “Politics”; however, even Vendler, a
classicist who considers gender (and race) to be secondary to
“temperament”, has demonstrated a consistent interest in the
compelling nature of Rich's writing and themes. One of the
characteristic themes of Rich's work is sexuality, discussed at
length and not without criticism by Ostriker (Writing
Like A Woman).
Notwithstanding, at one point in the interview, Rich asks, “What
about desire? How dangerous could it be?”, remarkable queries of
import for all inquisitive readers, especially, perhaps, women.
Anne
Charles, the only contributor who identifies as lesbian, acknowledges
the effect of Rich's “vision” , especially, the impact of “lies,
secrets, and silence” (see Rich's book of prose, 1979, of the same
name). Other essays address education, social change, location, and
the politics of motherhood, and some critics might classify Rich as a
writer in the “politically Queer” tradition (see Maggie Nelson's
2015 book, The Argonauts)
which has an uncomfortable relationship to maternity. Indeed, Rich's
early writing often concerned the stresses associated with motherhood
and other aspects of family life. Rich is, also, discussed as a “poet
of dissent”, and in Writing
Like A Woman, Ostriker
points out that Rich writes about many types of “burning” (e.g.,
books, men, children, slavery, sexual loneliness).
In my
opinion, the strongest essay is authored by Joshua Jacobs who
proposes that we compare Rich's poetry with that of Claudia Rankine
(see, Citizen: An
American Lyric,
2014). Jacobs seems, particularly, impressed with the idea that both
poets are “witnesses to social injustice”, women and blacks,
respectively. A strong case can be made for Jacobs' perspective, and
he has identified a new dimension of research on women's literature;
although, it seems to me that Rich had a global, in addition to a
local, perspective on violence and oppression, while one still
searches for these connections and influences in Rankine's writing. I
think that the most fundamental similarity between Rich and Rankine
is their treatment of language, such that, Rich states, “This is
the oppressor's language yet I need it to talk to you.” (Poems:
Selected And New, 1975),
while, similarly, Rankine says, “Perhaps the most insidious and
least understood form of segregation is that of the word.”
(Citizen).
A final observation that may be important when comparing these female
poets is that both would probably be considered conventional
(“normative”) by current Queer Theorists (e.g., Judith Butler,
Lee Edelman), making Jacobs' project even more significant to
scholars and intellectuals. One hopes that Jacobs will expand his
proposals, providing a template for other critics.
Although
this Critical Flame
Special Issue is an innovative and welcome initiative, two omissions
cannot be overlooked and limit its utility. First, Rich's lesbianism,
fundamental to her identity, “temperament”, politics, and
writing, is, for all purposes, not mentioned in the contributions,
including, Charles'. Even if this “lack” resulted because of
prurience, it is unfortunate, at best, and the Editor might have
added an essay to explore this aspect of Rich's personhood. Second,
Rich's partner, the scholar, Michelle Cliff (now 68), is not
mentioned in any of the issue's texts (including the interview and
video). Rich and Cliff were a couple from 1976 until Rich's death and
influenced each others' work. Cliff deserves the same acknowledgment
as a spouse or significant colleague of other major figures would
receive. In a 2010 interview with Julie R. Enszer on the Lambda
Literary Blog, Cliff, a woman of color and a highly-trained Italian
scholar who has been characterized as a practitioner of “resistance
literature”, reported that she is working on a manuscript about the
18th
Century Astronomer, Caroline Herschel. This project is, without
question, a “love-symbol” (a phrase from one of Cliff's poems) to
Rich whose famous poem, “Planetarium” (The
Will To Change), is
dedicated to Herschel. As a sign of Rich's devotion to Cliff, the
reader is referred to Rich's poem, “The Spirit Of Place” (A
Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far,
1981). Despite my reservations, “The enduring power of Adrienne
Rich” is recommended to readers as an important tribute to, as many
critics would conclude, the premier female poet of her generation in
America.
*Originally published in The Review Review, 2015
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