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

Literary Review, Summer, 2000 by Carol Bere

   --Why measure? In itself it's the measure--
   at the end of a day
   of great happiness if there be such a day

   drawn by love's unprovable pull

   I write this, sign it

   Adrienne

Notes

(1) All poetry and prose collections by Adrienne Rich are published by W. W. Norton & Company, New York.

(2) Rich has written of Muriel Rukeyser as the "most truly experimental and integratedly political poet of her time" (What is Found There, p. 195). In her introduction to The Muriel Rukeyser Reader (W. W. Norton & Company, 1995, xv), Rich spoke of the influence of Rukeyser's poetry on her work, "I came to Rukeyser in my maturity, as my own life opened out and I began to trust the direction of my own work. Gradually I found her to be the poet I most needed in the struggle to make my poems and live my life."

(3) Speaking with Bill Moyers a few years earlier, Rich commented that "one of the themes of the poetry that I've been trying to write in the last few years has been the necessity to keep hold of what I call in my own thinking "radical happiness." I think I got the phrase from Hannah Arendt, who was talking about public happiness, the happiness of the citizen participating in a civil compact that's really working.... It's something that I keep as a key phrase in my mind, that I write out of rather than try to define, and when I say radical I mean at the root, real. Real social transformation, real change has to come out of love of life, and a love for the world.... there's nothing wrong with personal happiness if you take it and use it as a key, a measure, a standard." (The Language of Life 339, 341)

Works Cited

Bhabha, Homi. Keynote speech, "Reinventing Britain Conference," The British Council, March 21, 1997, pp. 4-5) (http://old.britcoun.org/studies/ stdshb1.htm) Homi Bhabha also discussed and quoted the same poem in a talk at the MLA Conference in San Francisco, December 1998.

Muske, Carol. Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography, and the Shape of the Self. University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 1997, p. 38.

Rich, Adrienne. Interview with David Montenegro. American Poetry Review 20.1 (January-February 1991): 7-14; reprinted in Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose, ed. Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993, p. 259.

Rich, Adrienne. Interview with Bill Moyers. The Language of Life. New York: Doubleday, 1995, p. 344.

Rich, Adrienne. Interview with Matthew Rothschild. The Progressive, January 1994. (http://www.progressive.org/rothrich9401.htm)

Carol Bere, a freelance writer in New Jersey, has published reviews and articles in The Literary Review, Critical Essays on Ted Hughes, and in several financial magazines