I have no personal anecdotes about Adrienne Rich worthy of recording. She is a friend I know through her public, published writing, one whom I consider “a friend” because of the importance that writing has had for me over the last thirty-five years, whose presence is a presence in printed words, and therefore never at a great distance. I am in Paris, where I live half the time, but where all my books are not. I wanted in particular to reread (but they were absent) An Atlas of the Difficult World and Dark Fields of the Republic, an ocean away from a republic whose fields seem particularly lacking in illumination. Instead I started this morning before dawn, in bed, reading poems in the 2002 edition of The Fact of a Doorframe, all poems that I have read many times before. This is a body of work that (I know I have written this before) redeems poetry—not that redeeming poetry has ever particularly been Rich’s intention. I’m myself a woman of the Left, a feminist, a lesbian, a secular Jew, an American, and a poet, aware how some identities can be chosen or ignored and others constitute facts of one’s life immutable as bone structure, and how even this fact can be modified by history. Because I am a poet, the possibilities, the ramifications of what a poet might accomplish—as a writer and as what we now call a “public intellectual,” an eloquent representative citizen—have been important to me since I began to read and write myself out of childhood. There were, even in the United States, many examples; some of them were distressing. But Rich was a poet less than a generation my senior who was redefining these possibilities in a way I could understand; in a way that was useful. (It seems clear that one intention of Rich as a poet has been, at least since the sixties, to do something useful, and not only useful to younger poets.)