The Road Taken: Adrienne Rich in the 1990s - Poem

Literary Review, Summer, 2000 by Carol Bere

Rich's more recent work continues the conversation, moves across a continuum, perhaps with a more public voice, to explore issues of poetry and activism, or more specifically, the relationship of the participatory spirit to the creative act, the desire to forge a truly integrative, realized poetry, and somewhat surprisingly to critics of Rich, the possibilities for happiness. To a large extent, the poems in Atlas, Dark Fields, and Midnight Salvage, suggest Rich's belief of the power of poetry as a communal art. The most successful poems are essentially poems for representative voices, or "a theatre of voices," that open out far beyond academic confines or interpretation.

Rich comments that in Atlas "I was trying to talk about the location, the privileges, the complexity of loving my country and hating the ways our national interest is being defined for us" (interview with Rothschild). The sweep of the opening title poem, a thirteen-part sequence is all-encompassing, ranging over American landscape and history, moving from personal to national concerns, from local to more universal positions. The historical and personal blur as Rich, "bent on fathoming what it means to love my country," moves across the geography of the land, questioning received values, reflecting on shared history. Her scope is wide: from present-day California, where the planes dust the strawberries, "each picked by a hand"; to "farms of rust and stripping paint" in Vermont; to the "map of the country," a grim "mural" of wars, missiles, foreclosed farms, and depressing "suburbs of acquiesence."

Written during and after the Gulf War, the sequence concludes with the incantatory, pulsing Whitmanesque rhythms of "Dedications" (quoted in part):

   I know you are reading this poem
   late before leaving your office

   I know you are reading this poem which is not in your
   language
   guessing at some words while others keep you reading
   and I want to know which words they are.
   I know you are reading this poem listening for something,
   torn
   between bitterness and hope
   turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
   I know you are reading this poem because there is
   nothing else left to read
   there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

Asked about "Dedications," Rich responded that her objective was to speak to "people as individuals, but also as individuals multiplied over and over ... As part of a collectivity." In the last line, Rich commented that she first thought of someone with AIDS, or anyone in an isolated situation where only a book of poetry kept her / him in contact with the world. "But finally, I was thinking of our society, stripped of so much of what was hoped for and promised and given nothing in exchange but material commodities. And for me, that is being truly stripped" (interview with Moyers).

The concerns of Atlas lead directly into What is Found There, twenty-eight essays, letters, and excerpts from journals in which Rich says "I've been coming out as a poet, a poet who is a citizen, a citizen who is a poet," and questioning "how do those identities come together in a country with the particular traditions and attitudes regarding poetry that ours has" (interview with Rothschild). In characteristically direct, straightforward language, Rich speaks of her own growth and development as a poet, of the relationship between poetry and activism, of the need to reconcile activism and poetry itself--the conscious and the unconscious work--and the response and, to some extent, responsibility of the poet in a country where poetry, "like our past, our collective memory ... remains an unfathomed, a devalued, resource."