poetries plural and impure

There is no universal Poetry anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Vallejo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for Audre Lorde and Aimé Césaire, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple.

—Adrienne Rich, "Poetry & Commitment: An Essay" (2007)

rescued from formlessness

The poet’s relationship to her poetry has, it seems to me—and I am not speaking only of Emily Dickinson—a twofold nature. Poetic language—the poem on paper—is a concretization of the poetry of the world at large, the self, and the forces within the self; and those forces are rescued from formlessness, clarified, and integrated in the act of writing poems. But there is a more ancient concept of the poet, which is that she is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who—for whatever reasons—are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.

—Adrienne Rich, “Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson,” By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry (Graywolf, 2000), edited by Molly McQuade.

real sentiment

     Remind me how we loved our mother’s body
     our mouths drawing the first
     thin sweetness from her nipples

     our faces dreaming hour on hour
     in the salt smell of her lap Remind me
     how her touch melted childgrief

     how she floated great and tender in our dark
     or stood guard over us
     against our willing

Women performing traditional roles are no longer to be ridiculed but rather understood as products of an oppressive order, with, even so, valuable qualities. The terms of evaluation chosen here may strike some readers as verging on sentimentality, but definitions of sentimentality are always culturally determined: it is not a timeless, abstract quality. (When the word “sentimental” was coined in the eighteenth century, it was used in praiseful contexts.) Direct expression of tender feelings in these lines is no doubt part of the women’s aesthetic Rich has been searching for; in any case, the poem has renounced most of the irony and intellectual artillery of her earlier work. If writing tenderly means losing some readers, Rich is prepared to do so, on the chance that she may be making available feelings formerly dismissed as unacceptable for art. Any occasion for reexamining aesthetic strictures ought, of course, to be welcomed. Do we go to poetry mainly to sharpen the psychic (or conversational) defenses useful in daily life or to gain access to feelings we haven’t, for whatever reason, acknowledged?

—Alfred Corn, “Contemporary Poetry’s Mother Tongues,” Atlas: Selected Essays, 1989-2007 (University of Michigan Press, 2009)

not lost in spectacle

…it’s notable that the making of and participation in poetry is so independent of high technology. A good sound system at a reading is of course a great advantage. Poetry readings can now be heard on tape, radio, recorded on video. But poetry would get lost in an immense technological performance scene. What poetry can give has to be given through language and voice, not through effects of lighting, sound, superimposed film images, nor as mere adjunct to spectacle.

—Adrienne Rich, “Someone is Writing a Poem,” What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (W.W. Norton, 1993)

long, continuing process

In 1956, I had begun dating each of my 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; and 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, continuing process. It seems to me now that this was an oblique political statement—a rejection of the dominant critical idea that the poem’s text should be read as separate from the poet’s everyday life in the world. It was a declaration that placed poetry in a historical continuity, not above or outside history.

—Adrienne Rich, title essay of Blood, Bread, and Poetry (Norton, 1986)