A Change of World: A Friendship
Jean Valentine
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I had been thinking about maybe writing something about Adrienne’s and my friendship for this symposium, and a friend encouraged me, saying that our friendships with other writers are some of the best gifts of life. It’s true: it’s rare even to meet a poet you admire this deeply, and so much more rare to become close friends, lifetime friends.
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I’ve known Adrienne Rich, in her work, since 1952, when I was eighteen. I was walking down Garden Street, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one day in my first weeks at Radcliffe College, when a kindly old gentleman spoke to me, and as we talked, he asked me what I was interested in. I said poetry, and he asked if I knew the poetry of Adrienne Rich—she graduated from Radcliffe the year before. She had won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award (which I’d never heard of) while still an undergraduate. “We’re very proud of Adrienne Rich here,” he said. Looking back, he reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s grandfather, in her poem “Manners”:
