Only subscribers may read this in its entirety. What follows is a free preview, truncated midway through.
Adrienne Rich has fashioned a life in the language arts around the interface of public debate. In form and style it’s an astonishing achievement in that her practice upsets the facile categories bound to certainties of assumption and belief. She belongs to that rare strain in the United States—poet as public intellectual—and she continues to forge an enduring work that stands firmly among the almost-unanimously read of our leading veteran writers and public observers, regardless of aesthetic inclination. Not surprisingly, it is an endeavor as well, given the unquestionable stature of the work and its distinct commitments, all too often misrepresented. This factor can be ascribed, in no small part, to U.S.-American artistic convention—distinctly puritan bequest in this country, short on models that speak to the complex association of pleasure and purpose, to the tenuous links between action and meaning, and to ambivalence in general as a positive force in art that does not view unrest and exuberance as contradictory terms.
The work of Adrienne Rich belongs instead to a legacy that fuses surface effect with affect; whose cultural style, too, can join outrage and joy. Such affirmative promise is what Kenneth Burke referred to as one of shaping attitudes or stimulating action in other human agents; that which, in an expanded sense of the rhetorical, makes palpable the relations of power in such sight and sound activated by the spoken word. To address only the last century in this hemisphere, it’s what led Hart Crane to utilize Elizabethan display to inflect his otherwise seen-as-deviant desire; what drove Lorine Niedecker to score the intervals of sonic pattern as admission into the ravages of history. It’s what compelled César Vallejo to coin, in defiance of too-easy consumption, a geopolitical vocabulary in ethnic counterpoint to the colonial standard, and by contrast, what in his poetic system commanded José Lezama Lima to parade the Iberian with such neo-baroque excesses as to set the stagecraft of former empires on its head. It’s a style that asks whether urgency can shape not only the languages of desire, but the kinds of languages we desire; whether we can think of poetry and politics, not in terms of certain science, but by means of the metaphoric drive to prompt a double world—at once, still wanting and excessive to itself; a world comprehensible only by wager of extreme persuasion.
