Over the years I have come to appreciate female poets though sadly much of what I have read hasn't resonated with me well. In school, we are taught mostly of male poets and because of this I tend to gravitate towards the harder lines they write. In my handful of female favorites lies Adrienne Rich.
Adrienne Rich was born in 1929 in Baltimore, MD. Her father was a renowned pathologist and a chairman at Johns Hopkins. Her mother was a concert pianist. Her father was Jewish and her mother a Protestant. They raised their family as Christians.
Rich's love for literature started in her early childhood reading Isben, Arnold, Blake, Keats, Rossetti, and Tennyson from her father's library. He encouraged her love of reading. In her and her sister were home schooled by their mother until the 4th grade when they began public school. They continued in this fashion until graduation.
After high school Adrienne Rich attended Radcliffe where she focused on poetry and creative writing. She had no female professors from which to gain perspective. During her time at Radcliffe, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship to study abroad at Oxford University in England. Once at Oxford Rich took a side trip to Florence, Italy which prompted her to stay in Europe and explore Italy further.
In 1953 she married Alfred H. Conrad who was an economics professor at Harvard. She married him mainly to disconnect from her previous family and to have a "full woman's life". The settled in Cambridge, MA where they had three sons.
In the 1960's, Adrienne's life started to change as she received award and accolades for her writing and was granted another Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1963 she began to examine her own feminine identity. She produced a book during this period that dissected her life as a wife and mother called "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law".
By 1966 the family moved to NYC where her husband took a position at City College and she joined a group called New Left which was rife with activism and feminism. She would later be greatly involved in social issues including support for the Black Panthers and was very vocal at anti-war rallies. This caused great tension in her marriage with Conrad and they split in the mid-1970. Later that year he went into the woods and shot himself.
Rich, by 1976, had gotten into a partnership with novelist and editor Michelle Cliff. This relationship lasted until her death. Throughout the rest of her life Adrienne Rich remained active in human rights and explored in her work both her sexuality and her Jewish roots. She would teach at many colleges, win over 20 prizes/fellowships for her work, and publish over 30 books in her lifetime.
Adrienne Rich was an influential American Poet, essayist, and feminist. She died at the age of 82 in 2012 leaving us all a wonderfully rich legacy of work. Here is a poem from her book Diving into the Wreck:
Incipience
1. To live, to lie awake
under scarred plaster
while ice is forming over the earth
at an hour when nothing can be done
to further any decision
to know the composing of the thread
inside the spider's body
first atoms of the web
visible tomorrow
to feel the fiery future
of every matchstick in the kitchen
Nothing can be done
but by inches. I write out my life
hour by hour, word by word
gazing into the anger of old women on the bus
numbering the striations
of air inside the ice cube
imagining the existence
of something uncreated
this poem
our lives
2. A man is asleep in the next room
We are his dreams
We have the heads and breasts of women
the bodies of birds of prey
Sometimes we turn into silver serpents
While we sit up smoking and talking of how to live
he turns on the bed and murmurs
A man is asleep in the next room
A neurosurgeon enters his dream
and begins to dissect his brain
She does not look like a nurse
she is absorbed in her work
she has a stern, delicate face like Marie Curie
She is not/might be either of us
A man is asleep in the next room
He has spent a whole day
standing, throwing stones into the black pool
which keeps its blackness
Outside the frame of his dream we are stumbling up the hill
hand in hand, stumbling and guiding each other
over the scarred volcanic rock.
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