Dream and the Dialogue: Adrienne Rich's Feminist Poetics, The

College Literature, Jun 1996 by Diggory, Terence

Reading William Carlos Williams has given me hope that there is a way out of this predicament, so I find it peculiarly appropriate that Williams's famous love poem, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," supplies the title of Rich's What Is Found There. Against the advice of deconstruction, Williams's phrase directs us to look to the text of the poem for what is present rather than what is absent.

If the author is absent as a guarantor of meaning, "what is found there" in the very structure of the poem is the author's love for the materials that compose that structure. For Rich, this is how the poem not only imagines but materially embodies an alternative to existing social relations: "What is represented as intolerable-as crushing-becomes the figure of its own transformation, through the beauty of the medium and through the artist's uncompromised love for that medium, a love as deep as the love of freedom. These loves are not in opposition" (What Is Found There 249). The poetic medium in its material aspect receives progressively greater acknowledgment as Templeton reads through the three volumes of poems Rich has published since A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. The latest volume, An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), is treated in a chapter that Templeton entitles "The Material and the Dream," the dream in this case being the goal of women's liberation that Rich identifies with "the love of freedom." However, in keeping with the poststructuralist concept of dialogue, Templeton suspects the material of resisting rather than embodying the dream. Were she less attuned to discord among the theorists, Templeton might have listened more intently to the poet who says constantly through a diverse body of work: "These loves are not in opposition."