Adrienne Rich: Poet & Roofwalker Extraordinaire

I have just heard that Adrienne Rich has died at the age of 82. I first came across  American poet Adrienne Rich on a school syllabus while tutoring a few years ago. Her poems were revelatory and rebellious and I was instantly hooked. She was the first poet that I was passionate about teaching and such a great addition to the usual traditional line-up of poets (predominantly male, I might add) on the schoolbooks.

I especially admired her for her outspokenness in the restrictive time she was writing. As a woman, declaring herself (and pursuing being) a writer was an incredibly brave thing to do, given that the profession was so male-dominated and female-wary. I also admired the fact that she was fearless as a person in the pursuit of happiness, abandoning all things that kept her tied down, kept her from being her true self, was not afraid of taking 'leaps' to live a full and true life, a life of 'a succession of brief, amazing moments/each one making possible the next.'

Rich's poems lodge in your mind as fiery assaults on patriarchy, gender inequality and society's moulded stereotypical strata. Who can forget the irony of 'The Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room,' the raw truth on the disillusionment and inequality of relationships in 'Living in Sin' and 'Trying to Talk to a Man', or the wise fortitude of 'From a Survivor,' the ground-breaking seminal feminist riposte 'Diving into the Wreck', the powerful and presidential  inauguration speech material 'Storm Warnings' and indeed, the tigers, those stitched and in spirit, of 'Aunt Jennifer Tigers', or the fearless and gutsy admission of her career choice in 'The Roofwalker'? Her poems pack a punch of truth that lingers long after reading. She is one of those rare poets who writes about things that really matter, who infuses her art with her spirit and uses it as a vehicle not only to express emotion, but to also further the cause she was fighting for, while at the same time, never letting it impinge on her abilities, skills and priorities as a writer.

Denise Pop has this to say about her in 'The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States'

(© OUP 1995)

'There is no writer of comparable influence and achievement in so many areas of the contemporary women's movement as the poet and theorist Adrienne Rich. Over the years, hers has become one of the most eloquent, provocative voices on the politics of sexuality, race, language, power, and women's culture. There is scarcely an anthology of feminist writings that does not contain her work or specifically engage her ideas...' 

Adrienne Rich is not only one of my favourite poets, but one of my most admired people.  When I think of how to sum up Adrienne Rich, I think of Aunt Jennifer in her poem 'Aunt Jennifer's Tigers,' the woman whose life was blighted with domestic servitude and gender inequality. But still she found time to create, and even after her death, Rich notes that 'the tigers in the panel that she made/will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.' A fitting line to describe Rich and her legacy.

~ Siobhán.

 

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers - Adrienne Rich

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen,

Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.

They do not fear the men beneath the trees

They pace in sleek chivalric certainty. 

Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool    
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.    
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band  
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.  
 
When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie    
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.    
The tigers in the panel that she made    
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

The Roofwalker - Adrienne Rich 

Over the half-finished houses
night comes. The builders
stand on the roof. It is
quiet after the hammers,
the pulleys hang slack.
Giants, the roofwalkers,
on a listing deck, the wave
of darkness about to break
on their heads. The sky
is a torn sail where figures
pass magnified, shadows
on a burning deck.
I feel like them up there:
exposed, larger than life,
and due to break my neck.
Was it worth while to lay--
with infinite exertion--
a roof I can't live under?
--All those blueprints,
closings of gaps
measurings, calculations?
A life I didn't choose
chose me: even
my tools are the wrong ones
for what I have to do.
I'm naked, ignorant,
a naked man fleeing
across the roofs
who could with a shade of difference
be sitting in the lamplight
against the cream wallpaper
reading--not with indifference--
about a naked man
fleeing across the roofs.

Hurricane High-Kicks

I'm writing this post in the middle of a ferociously stormy day, wind battering the windowpane behind me,  whishing and whipping up a frenzy in what seems to be the high-tail end of a hurricane passing by!

Yay! I love stormy days. Routine bites the dust and everyone is swept away by a gusto of awed annoyance. Normal conversation is out; comments on the weather in - the refrain 'it would blow you away out there!' not a weather-monger's exaggeration anymore, but a shuddering real possibility! How exciting!

Is there anything like a stormy day to blow the cobwebs away?? Clear the head, big-time. "There'll be no sleepwalking around today" a woman commented to me earlier. Hell no! Not when there's a hurricane in town and the only thing on your mind is walking successfully through it! Storms put us back in touch with this great  physical planet of ours and away from the whirlwind in our heads we may be caught up in. Nature when loud, makes herself heard above all other common cacophonies. Hence, the mighty cobweb-blasting.

While storms offer up all kinds of metaphors and allegories to a writer, this one  just occured to me today while wind-walking (ah, i.e. almost para-gliding): that walking against the wind must be what it's like to go against Fate, or against the current of convention. The physical equivalent. Damn hard thing to do with a wailing wall of steel in front of you, pushing you back, screaming you down, gales bashing and lashing up a fearful stupor of inferiority, rendering you helpless and hapless.

(Whoa, there it goes again, the wind getting up. Not whistling, but roaring!) No wonder it's personified all the time, as compared to the other elements. Some writers have even referred to wind as having a 'spiritual energy.' Didn't the Holy Spirit after all, manifest in the Bible as great gusts of wind? Maybe it's the sheer invisible power of it that embues it with such significance.

Then there's the emotional element, with storms being an allegory for emotional states and emotional crises (explored in the poem below by Adrienne Rich). Talk of weathering the storm, battening down the hatches, preparing for stormy days, knowing the storm-clouds will pass has become almost clichéd in our emotional language de jour. Lots of writers have explored this facet. Weather is perhaps the most ubiquitious metaphor to a writer, who can use it for figuratively moulding and describing our changeable emotional psyches.

And there's the Dorothy phenomenon also. As in Wizard of Oz Dorothy whose house was lifted and transported to Oz by a tornado/twister. The magical-realist-fantastical element to a storm. You can't help but think of that on a stormy day! Take a falling slate on the head, fall, blank out - and hey presto - you're on a yellow-brick road to enlightenment! Or maybe it's another way of saying that in with a storm blows realisation, of some kind or other (not necessarily including a wizard.)

What I like about storms too is the primitive mode they put us in. Batten down the hatches, ride it out, with supplies and survival tactics at the ready. The snuggled-up-and-stay-indoors policy. They're the only encounter with real natural 'danger' most of us will experience. And they set the adrenalin on high alert, reminding us that we're alive and there's a big bad wailing world out there, trying to huff and puff our neat self-made securities down.

They also carry an essential ego-check for us: we're pretty much helpless in the face of the elements' power. 'Man has need of nature, but nature has no need of man' is something we should not forget. Nature in all her malevolent glory is majestic and menacing. Even metaphysical. As writer Joan Didion has noted, 'the wind shows us how close to the edge we are.' It reminds us of our mortality and of each moment blowing through time, adding a sweep of meaning to the otherwise calm (and sometimes claustrophobic) mundane. 

On that note, I'll sign off and get back to storm-enjoying, 

Have a safe day!

~ Siobhán.

'Storm Warnings'- Adrienne Rich

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of grey unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction. 

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters. 

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.