Adrienne Rich

By
Qaisar Iqbal Janjua From Lahore, Pakistan. Contact (92) 300 8494678
qaisarjanjua@hotmail.com, qaisarjanjua@gmail.com,
qaisarjanjoa@yahoo.com
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SELECTED POEMS
Adrienne Rich
(1935-…)
“I did this because I was finished with the idea of
a poem as a single, encapsulated event, a work of
art complete in itself; I knew my life was changing,
my work was changing, and I needed to indicate to
readers my sense of being engaged in a long,
continuous process.”
Adrienne Rich
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LIFE AND WORKS OF ADRIENNE RICH
To a significant extent, all poets are concerned with
transformation. The
very making of a poem involves a transformation from perceived
reality or
experience into a verbal utterance shaped by the poet's
imagination and craft.
For Adrienne Rich, however, transformation goes beyond the act
of writing;
it extends to the culture at large through the poem's ability to
challenge
given assumptions and offer new visions.
Transformation is thus private as well as public, and Rich's poetry
and
essays have explored the space where these realms intersect,
incorporating
feminist, lesbian, historical, non-capitalist, and humanitarian,
multi-racial,
and multi-cultural points of view. The form of her poems has
evolved with
her content, moving from tight formalist lyrics to more
experimental poems
using a combination of techniques: long lines, gaps in the line,
interjections
of prose, juxtaposition of voices and motifs, didacticism, and
informal
expression. Indeed, no poet's career reflects the cultural and
poetic
transformations undergone in the United States during the 2Oth
century
better than that of Adrienne Rich.
Rich demonstrated talent early in life, writing poems under her
father's
tutelage as a child. By the time she graduated from Radcliff
College her first
book, A Change of World (1951), had been selected by W.H.
Auden for the
Yale Younger Poets Prize. This and her second book, The Diamond
Cutters
(1955), capture alienation and loss through the distancing devices
of
Modernist for malism, but both books contain poems that hint at
her future
thematic concerns. “Storm Warnings,” from A Change of World,
speaks of
people “Who live in troubled regions” and foreshadows
unspecified but
disturbing change:
“Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless
of prediction.”
“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” offers an image of power revealed and
restrained by domestic arts. Three poems in The Diamond Cutters
- “Picture
by Vuillard,” “Love in the Museum” and “Ideal Landscape” -
question the
version of reality offered by art, while “Living in Sin” depicts a
woman's
growing dissatisfaction with her lover and living situation.
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), which reflects the
tensions she
experienced as a wife and mother in the 1950s, marks a
substantial change in
Rich's style and subject matter. “The experience of motherhood,”
Rich wrote
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in “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” (1982), “was
eventually
to radicalise me.” Part of that radicalising process involved Rich's
relationship to both poetry and history. In 1956 she began dating
her poems
by year:
“I did this because I was finished with the idea of a poem
as a single,
encapsulated event, a work of art complete in itself; I
knew my life
was changing, my work was changing, and I needed to
indicate to
readers my sense of being engaged in a long, continuous
process.”
Rich's next three books - Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets
(1969),
and The Will to Change (1971) - reflect the social upheaval of the
late 1960s
and early 1970s. Like other poets of her generation, such as
Denise
Levertov, Robert Bly and W. S. Merwin, she wrote poems
protesting the
Vietnam War, particularly in Leaflets. Images of death pervade
Necessities
of Life as the poet struggled to create a life no longer shaped by
the
predetermined rituals and social roles. Emily Dickinson became a
recurring
figure in her poems, foreshadowing her influential essay,
“Vesuvius at
Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson” (1975). Rich's poems also
became
increasingly experimental, employing longer, contrapuntal lines.
She
adapted the ghazal, a Persian form traditionally used for
expressions of love,
to convey social and political comment. At the same time, Rich
began to
distrust her medium because of its close ties to patriarchical
culture. “This is
the oppressor's language // yet I need it to talk to you,” she writes
in “The
Burning of Paper Instead of Children,” a five-poem sequence with
prose
segments in The Will to Change.
Informed more distinctly by a feminist analysis of history and
culture,
“Diving into the Wreck” (1973) marks another turning point in
Rich's career.
In it she expresses her anger regarding women's position in
Western culture
more directly and alludes to problematic dualities or images of
Otherness.
Language, too, remains on trial for its duplicitous nature. The
book's title
poem, one of the 20th century's most significant poems, uses an
androgynous diver to examine a culture wrecked by its limited
view of
history and myth. As with Leaflets and The Will to Change, this
book's tone
ranges from critical to accusatory. When Diving into the Wreck
was
awarded the National Book Award in 1974, Rich rejected the prize
as an
individual but accepted it, with a statement co-authored by Audre
Lorde and
Alice Walker, on behalf of all unknown women writers.
Rich’s poetry from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s has been
considered her most radical, in part because in them she rejects
her earlier
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use of androgyny and seems to make a case for feminist
separatism. “There
are words I cannot choose again: / humanism androgyny,” she
writes in
“Natural Resources,” in which a female miner replaces the
androgynous
diver of “Diving into the Wreck”. Rich defines and addresses her
villain
more clearly: a patriarchical culture that inherently devalues
anything female
or feminine. The impulse behind the search, however, remains the
same:
finding a way to “reconstitute the world” (The Dream of a
Common
Language, 1978). Rich advocates a woman-centre ed vision of
creative
energies that she aligns with lesbianism in her essays “'It Is the
Lesbian in
Us'“ (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, 1979) and “Compulsory
Heterosexuality
and Lesbian Experience” (Blood, Bread, and Poetry, 1986). She
also
criticizes the impact of patriarchical culture on motherhood in Of
Woman
Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976). Other
essays as
well as poems like in The Dream of a Common Language, and A
Wild
Patience Has Taken Me, and This Far (1981) offer important new
readings
of female literary and historical figures. Rich's lesbian love
sequence,
“Twenty-One Love Poems,” also dates from this time and is as
striking for
its sensuousness as it is for its philosophical probing.
The poems and essays from this period contributed greatly to
contemporary understanding of the social construction of gender;
they also
generated controversy. Critics objected to the didacticism in her
poetry and
considered her feminist/lesbian vision too narrow. Rich's
strategies are more
usefully seen as a counterpoint to the pervasiveness of
patriarchical culture,
which harms men as well as women. While Rich may claim, for
example,
that women together create “a whole new poetry” in poems such
as
“Transcendental Etude,” her ultimate vision is broader. The “lost
brother”
Rich describes in “Natural Resources” “was never the rapist,” but
rather “a
fellow creature / with natural resources equal to our own” (The
Dream of a
Common Language).
Rich sees undercurrents of violence in the materialism of the
1980s and
1990s that neither poets nor individuals can afford to ignore.
These themes,
as well as the role of poetry in political and social life, are also
explored in
her book of essays what is found there: Notebooks on Poetry and
Politics
(1993).
In her latest book of poems, Midnight Salvage (1999), Rich
continues
this discussion from the perspective of an aging activist poet
looking back
on her life. She alludes to several of her previous poems and
books, and
poses several questions: Has anything useful been salvaged from
the wreck
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of culture Rich has been exploring for more than 30 years? Have
art and
language served society and the poet well? Does material comfort
blind
Americans to the lessons of the past? Her questions are not
casually
answered, and the book's tone borders on despair. “I wanted to
go
somewhere / the brain bad not yet gone,” she writes in “Letters to
a Young
Poet,” “I wanted not to be / there so alone.” The “wild patience”
that helped
Rich to survive into the late 1970s and early 1980s has become
the “horrible
patience” the poet needs to find language she can use effectively.
Images of
windows appear throughout the book as if the poet, enclosed and
cut off
from the world, were struggling to see it clearly. In the book's
closing
sequence, “A Long Conversation,” Rich wonders if it is the
“charred,
crumpled, ever-changing human language” that “always and
presses against
the pane,” blocking her view.
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MOST EXPECTED QUESTIONS
Q: DISCUSS ADRIENNE RICH AS A POETESS?
Q: WHAT ARE THE MAIN THEMES IN RICH’S POETRY?
Q: RICH CLAIMS ABOUT HERSELF TO BE A FEMINST, IS SHE
RIGHTLY KNOWN?
Q: RICH IS A VOICE OF OPPRESSED WOMEN, DO YOU
AGREE?
Ans:
Adrienne Rich’s poetry weaves a cultural and emotional tapestry
that is
bold, sometimes uneven, but always innovative and profoundly
original and
powerful. Certain strands persist throughout---a commitment to
lucidity,
authentic communication, community and social change; other
threads---
revolutionary anger, political activism are also main concerns of
Adrienne
Rich. In Rich’s poetry reader is all the time with a woman who is
sensitive,
romantic, easy to be influenced on the one hand but on the other
hand this
woman is bold enough to criticize and discard the male defined
culture and
civilization.
She is a poetess who feels with woman and becomes the voice of
most
deprived segment of the society. Her “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” is
externalisation of a woman who is under the male dominant social
set up.
Her “Final Notations” presents the confidence of woman in her
ability and
love. “Gabriel” is an expression of religionist mind, and strong
faith in God
is hallmark of this poem. Here Rich has shifted from particular to
general
and trends of twentieth century which are full of social injustices
and
modern commercialism are a source of tragic feelings of angel
and of
poetess. “Diving into The Wreck” is an epic of modern times and
it offers
woman new horizons in the sky of relations. So in the collection of
poems
described in the syllabus in particular and in her poetry in general
Adrienne
Rich is a great champion of woman rights.
Adrienne Rich’s poetry provides a chronicle of the evolving
consciousness of the modern woman. Composed in a period of
rapid and
dramatic social change, her work explores the experience of
women who
reject patriarchal definitions of femininity by separating
themselves from the
political and social reality that trivializes and subordinates
females. She
herself defines a patriarchal society is one in:
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“Which males are dominant and determine what part
females shall
and shall not play, and in which capabilities assigned to
women are
relegated generally to the mystic and aesthetic and
excluded from the
practical and political realms “.
As a feminist poet Rich insists on the importance of the
“imaginative
identification with all women” and commits herself to the
recreation of a
female community that is dedicated to a nurturing ethos and a
reverence of
life.
At the award ceremony of her famous book “Diving Into the
Wreck”
she dedicated the occasion to the community of women that
transcends race
and class;
“The poet, the housewife, the lesbian, the mathematician,
the mother,
the dishwasher, the pregnant teenager, the teacher, the
grandmother,
the prostitute, the philosopher, the waitress… “
This community of women, Rich hopes, will not only resist the
damaging and crippling effects of patriarchy but will also create a
culture in
which women have equal economic, social, and political rights
with men.
Rich has given a new idea of woman state, which is never ever a
utopian
ideal. She does not only dreams for it rather she is also one of the
exponents
of her idea. In her poetry she has not totally discarded male
members of the
society but her attraction towards them is marred by their own
attitude which
is callous and clinical. In “The Final Notations” apparently beloved
is bold
enough that she can live even without her lover but underlying
tone of
poignant feelings shows herself a pretty hopeful woman from her
love.
Rich in her poetry has given a great deal of individualism to the
woman
of modern age. Her main concern is that woman of modern age
must be
considered as the effective, dynamic and functional part of the
society. Aunt
in “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” is a great artist. Her art of weaving is
matchless.
Aunt is representing the whole community of women. She is
repressed
physically under the weight of “Uncle’s Wedding’s Band” but she
is free in
her mind and soul that is why she is fearful but her creation
‘tigers’ are not
afraid of men. This freedom of mind and soul, which is one of the
basic
rights of every individual are denied to woman under the male
defined
culture. Rich is a crusader against pre-set standards of male and
female
relations and dives deep into the wreck of relations and brings on
the surface
a new yet free relationship between female and female “I am he, I
am she” is
the ultimate message of Rich’s struggle.
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Rich’s vision of a perfect peaceful society for woman is very
attractive
and ideal one. Her heroine is always a perfection of feelings
incarnate but a
mature and confident lady. Her heroine celebrates the ancient
mysteries of
blood and birth, but no longer will she be defined solely by her
reproductive
functions; her understanding and experience of life will give her a
vision as
effective and as commanding as history has known;
“As a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied
It will take all your flesh, it will not be simple”.
Future superwoman will be in command of her body, her erotic
and
creative energies, and she will celebrate life, not death. No longer
will she be
an ornamental servant but autonomous, self-directing, and free
from the
patriarchal edict that anatomy is destiny. This new woman will not
spring
from the head of Zeus or from Adam’s rib; she must pass through
the
dangers of this life: she must survive and transcend a culture that
can wound
and kill her. Her strength and commanding power will depend on
her
capacity successfully to pass through or turn away from
patriarchal
domination.
Q: “DIVING INTO THE WRECK” IS AN EPIC OF MODERN
TIMES IN WHICH RICH HAS EXPLORED NEW MEANINGS
OF RELATIONSHIPS, DISCUSS?
Q: “DIVING INTO THE WRECK” IS REAL REPRESENTATION
OF RICH’S GENIUS?
Ans:
In this poem of journey and transformation Rich is tapping the
energies
and plots of myth, while re-envisioning the content. While there is
a hero, a
quest, and a buried treasure, the hero is a woman; the quest is a
critique of
old myths; the treasure is knowledge: the whole buried
knowledge of the
personal and cultural foundering of the relations between the
sexes, and a
self-knowledge that can be won only through the act of criticism.
The wreck represents the battered hulk of the sexual definitions
of the
past, which Rich, as an underwater explorer, must search for
evidence of
what can be salvaged. Only those who have managed to survive
the wreck--
women isolated from any meaningful participation or voice in
forces that led
to the disaster--are in a position to write its epitaph and their own
names in
new books.
The experience of nothingness and the courage to see are at the
heart of
the poem Diving into The Wreck. The poem is a parallel between
two
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different kinds of diving. Symbolism is the core of the poem.
Apparently
poet is a diver who is to dive in the wreck to search out the
damage and
treasures. The sea is the metaphor of the world. Wreck is the
wreck of
civilization where individual recognition of the woman is sacrificed
and
drowned for the sake of male dominance. Rich has dived deep to
extract the
real meanings and status of man woman relationship.
Rich is not an expert diver but her confidence i.e. the flippers will
help
her to explore the wreck. Before starting her diving she is fully
equipped
with tools like a traditional divers but here diving is not
traditional. She has
read the book of myths (traditional definitions of man woman
relations), a
camera (her memory and vision), and a sharp knife (her new
ideas and her
own belief in her new definition of sexual relationship). It is a deep
and
dangerous journey where anything is possible. Diver descends in
the water
and its colour changes from blue to green and from green to
black. This
changing of colour is also symbolic. There is the effect of ‘blacking
out’, it
is the vision of poetess , in the deep down she is free from all kind
of
traditional taboos and definitions, in this free atmosphere she can
decide
now according to her own perception.
As she descends deep down to the sea she is confused. She loses
her
identity or she confidently behaves like an androgyny as she
approaches the
wreck;
“The mermaid whose dark hair streams black,
the merman in his armour body …
I m she, I m he…”
Speaking, feeling, and seeing for both sexes, the poet wants to
witness.
“The wreck and not the story of the wreck
The thing itself and not the myth”.
This quest for something beyond myths, for the truths about men
and
women about the “I” and the “you” the “he” and the “she” are
more
generally about the powerless and the powerful. In admitting “I
am he, I am
she”, Rich is feeling both the virtues; of man and woman,
powerful and
powerless, she is adopting both of the role in the sexual
relationships
between woman and a woman. Yet she cannot confidently admit
this dual
role so she is still in the deep to search out the reality.
It is, rather, the all-compassing ‘deep element’ in which she must
learn.
“To turn my body without force”.
She has come.
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“To explore the wreck. The damage that has done and the
treasures
that prevails”.
The wreck is a layered image; it is the life of one woman, the
source of
successes and failures; it is the history of all women submerged in
a
particular culture, it is that source of myths about male and
female sexuality,
which shape our lives and roles today. Whichever, the swimmer
came for:
“The wreck and not story of the wreck
The thing itself and not the myth”.
She explores the wreck and records for us her experiences of the
cargo,
“The half-destroyed instrument… the water-eaten log the
fouled
compass”.
But no questions are answered here for those who have not found
their
own way to this place; we are given no explanation for why the
wreck
occurred. Nor is there any account of the swimmer’s return, the
use to which
she puts this new information. It is as if Rich still found herself in
the
dilemma at the end of “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” when it
seemed
impossible to record an image of the “new woman”. Indeed, she
said in 1974
two years after “Diving into the Wreck”.
I absolutely cannot imagine what it would like to be a woman in a
nonpatriarchal
society. At moments I have this little glimmer of it. When I’m in
a group of women, where I have a sense of real energy flowing
and of power
in the best sense – not power of domination, but just access to
source – I
have some sense of what that could be like. But it’s very rare that
I can
imagine even that.
Moving in deeply private images, circling darkly and richly into
the
very sources of her poetry, she is, as she says,
“Coming home to…. sex, sexuality, sexual wounds, sexual
identity,
and sexual politics”.
Dreaming of the person within the poem, she walking toward me,
naked, swaying bending down, her dark long fair falling forward of
its own
weight like heavy cloth shielding my-face and her own, her full
breasts
brushing my cheek, moving toward my mouth. The dream is the
invention of
the dreamer, and the content of the dream moves in symbols of
sustenance
and of comfort. The hands of that diving woman become our own
hands,
reaching out, touching, holding; not in sex but in deliverance.
That is the
potency of her poetry; it infuses dreams, it makes possible
connections
between people in the face of what seems of be irrevocable
separateness, it
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forges an alliance between the poet and the reader. The power of
her
woman’s voice crying out, I am, surviving, sustaining, continuing,
and
making whole.
The enthusiasm for her efforts to create a myth of androgynous
sexuality is a typical case. To applaud the androgynous psyche or
to
announce this as its historical moment is easier than actually
living out its
consequences.
“I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair Streams back,
the merman
in his armoured body”.
I am she, I am he, We all have more varied sexual impulses than
we can
act on, but will Rich’s romanticized androgynous figure,
“Whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes”,
Help bring them any closer to realization? While that is not a
criterion
one would ordinarily apply to all poetry, it is relevant in Rich’s
case. Unlike
Roethke, he cannot take pleasure in the powerlessness of poetic
solutions to
social and historical conflicts. Her poetry continually testifies to
her need to
work out possible modes of human existence verbally, to achieve
imaginatively what cannot yet be achieved in actual relationships.
Moreover,
she hopes that poetry can transform human interaction. Yet
perhaps that is
not, after all the point, at least in poems like “Diving into the
Wreck” despite
its call for “the thing itself and not the myth”. For what we have
here is the
myth, as Rich herself has now implicitly acknowledged.
“There are words I cannot choose again; humanism
androgyny”.
“Such words”, she goes on to say, “have no shame in them”.
They do
not embody the history of anguish, repression and self-control
that precedes
them. “Their glint is too shallow”, they do not describe either the
past or the
life of the present. As Rich has recently written of bisexuality,
“Such a notion blurs and sentimentalises the actualities
within which
women have experienced sexuality; it is the old liberal
leaf across the
tasks a struggle of here and now”. Indeed.”
“Diving into the Wreck” demonstrates that one can suppress
difficult
feelings by mythologizing them. It may be that both Rich and her
readers are
relieved to have their fear and their desire conjoined in symbols
so stylised
and abstract.
According to a well-known critic Rachel:
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“In this poem of journey and transformation Rich is
tapping the
energies and plots of myth while re-envisioning the
content. While
there is a hero, a quest and a buried treasure is
knowledge; the whole
buried knowledge of the personal and cultural foundering
of the
relations between the sexes, and a self-knowledge that
can be won
only through the act of criticism.”
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Q: “AUNT JENNIFER'S TIGERS” IS REPRESENTATIVE POEM
OF RICH’S FEMINISM, ELABORATE?
Ans:
The fearful, gloomy woman waiting inside her darkening room for
the
emotional and meteorological devastation to hit, could be Aunt
Jennifer,
who is similarly passive and terrified, overwhelmed by events that
eclipsed
her small strength. “Aunt Jennifer's Tigers” is, however, an even
clearer
statement of conflict in women, specifically between the impulse
to freedom
and imagination (her tapestry of prancing tigers) and the
“massive weight”
of gender roles and expectations, signified by “Uncle's wedding
band.”
Although separated through the use of the third person and a
different
generation, neither Aunt Jennifer in her ignorance nor Rich as a
poet
recognizes the fundamental implications of the division between
imagination
and duty, power and passivity.
The tigers display in art the values that Aunt Jennifer must
repress or
displace in life: strength, assertion, fearlessness, and fluidity of
motion. And
the poem's conclusion celebrates the animal images as a kind of
triumph,
transcending the limited conditions of their maker's life. Accepting
the
doctrine of “ars longa, vita brevis,” Rich finds in her character's
art both
persistence and compensation; she sees the creations as
immortalizing the
hand that made them, despite the contrary force of the
oppressive structure
of Aunt Jennifer's conventional marriage, as signified by the ring
that binds
her to her husband. This doctrine is utterly consonant with what
was,
according to Rich, “a recurrent theme in much poetry I read [in
those days] .
. . the indestructibility of poetry, the poem as vehicle for personal
immortality”. And this more or less explicit connection helps show
how
deeply implicated Rich herself was in Aunt Jennifer’s situation and
her
achievement, despite the “asbestos gloves” of a distancing
formalism that
“allowed me to handle materials I couldn’t pick up barehanded”.
The problem, however, is that the tigers are clearly masculine
figures--
and not only masculine, but heroic figures of one of the most role-
bound of
all the substructures of patriarchy: chivalry. Their “chivalric
certainty” is a
representation by Aunt Jennifer of her own envisioned power, but
it is
essentially a suturing image, at once stitching up and reasserting
the rift
between her actual social status and her vision. Aunt’s name,
after all,
echoes with the sound of Queen Guinevere's; her place in chivalry
is clear.
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Her tigers are only Lancelots, attractive because illicit, but finally
seducing
her to another submission to the male. So long as power can be
envisioned
only in terms that are culturally determined as masculine, the
revolutionary
content of the vision, which was all confined to a highly mediated
and
symbolic plane in any case, will remain insufficient, Indeed, the
fact that the
patriarchs here imagine assertion against the patriarchy only in
terms set
may be seen as this poem’s version of the tigers’ “fearful
symmetry.” And
the “Immortal hand or eye” that framed their symmetry is not
Aunt
Jennifer's framing her needlework, but patriarchy’s, framing Aunt
Jennifer.
Reading of the poem, however, is that the poem resists those
oppositions upon which Pope’s and Byars’ criticisms depend. I
would argue
that “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” does not stage a contest between the
individual
and the social, but rather characterizes them by their
interdependence. (The
personal in this poem is deeply implicated in the political, and
vice versa.) In
the central symbols of the poem--the tapestry tigers and the
Uncle’s wedding
band--the individual and social, the personal and the political
meet. The
tapestry tigers are not just individual artistic expressions; they
are politically
inflected, engaged in patriarchal chivalry myths (as Byars
argues), and--as
icons of colonialism (I would add)--suggestive of capitalist regimes
of
power (notice too they are sewn with an “ivory needle”). The
personal and
the political again meet in the intimacy of “Uncle's wedding
band”. By the
physical intimacy of a wedding band and by the familial presence
conferred
by “Uncle’s wedding band” (emphasis added), “Aunt Jennifer's
Tigers”
personalizes the presence of patriarchal politics.
The poem's structure also draws the personal into the political
and the
political into the personal. The parallel syntactical structures of
verses one
and two suggest the relatedness of their content. Both follow the
construction “Aunt Jennifer’s,” with verse two substituting “tigers
prance
across the screen” with the similar sounding “fingers fluttering
though her
wool”. The use of colour in the second lines of each
verse--”topaz” and
“green” and “ivory” -and the presence of men in the third
lines-”the men
beneath the tree” and “Uncle’s wedding band” persist in the
stanzas’
parallelisms. These parallelisms draw associations between the
images
described. Owing to such parallelisms, the straining “fingers” of
the second
verse resonate with the energetic “tigers” of first verse. Reading
the second
stanza back to the first, the weight that “sits heavily upon Aunt
Jennifer’s
hand” of its final line lends sobriety to the “chivalric certainty” of
the final
line of the first stanza. Though verse one nominally describes
artistic
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freedom, and verse two nominally describes patriarchal power,
the structural
affinities between the two verses resist the strict binarizing of
rebellion and
repression. The final verse of the poem persists in this
destabilization as here
rebellion and repression meet in the simultaneity of the fearless
tigers and
the lifeless aunt:
“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.”
To condemn “Aunt Jennifer’s Tiger’s” then, as Byars does, for its
rebellion’s indebtedness to patriarchal culture is, I would argue, to
miss the
point. What makes the poem interesting, I think, is the very
interplay between
rebellion and repression, between the individual and the social,
between the
personal and the political. To demand a resolution wherein
individual
expression wholly escapes the social/political, magically rising
above
patriarchal discourse, seems to me a least a little naive and
largely dismissive
of the poem's more sophisticated conceptualisation of power.
Q: DISCUSS ADDRIENE RICH’S POETIC STYLE?
Ans:
Rich is best known as a key figure in feminist poetry. Her dream
of a
better language and a better world, however, aligns her with the
visionary
poetess of Shelley and Whitman, and with American
transcendentalists such
as Emerson.
The documentary nature of her work - her poetry of witness and
protest
- is in keeping with the work of poets such as Carl Sandburg,
Robert
Hayden, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Carolyn Forché, and
the
lesser-known 19th-century worsen poets in England and the
United States
who wrote about social and domestic injustice.
Rich’s exploration of the points where private lives and public acts
intersect, as well as the confessional mode her poems sometimes
employ
suggests the work of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plash, and Anne
Sexton. Her
frank discussion and celebration of lesbian sexuality have
contributed to a
more open discussion of homosexuality today, not only within the
walls of
the academy but in the culture at large: it is difficult to imagine
the work of
Marilyn Hacker or Minnie Bruce Pratt without Rich as a precursor.
Finally, her insistence in the 1980s that feminism move beyond
the
white middle class and be more sensitive to the needs of women
of colour
and of varying economic classes aligns her with a number of
poets: Audre
By
16
Lord, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Judy Grahn, and Irish poet Evan
Boland. This
is a short list of links and influences, suggesting the complex and
generative
quality a poetics of transformation can possess. Her uses of
anger, domestic
imagery, and the poetic sequence or long poem suggest other
possibilities.

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