Adrienne Rich Online Interviews Essay Research Paper

Adrienne Rich: Online Interviews Essay, Research Paper

from "The

Possibilities of an Engaged Art: An Interview with Adrienne Rich"

by Ruth E. C. Prince

What have been the strongest influences upon

your political beliefs.

Different in different periods. Growing up in segregated Baltimore, before and during

World War II. Sensing the ill-faith, the sheeted silences, of that apart-life long before

I had a language for it. Being at college in a politically contentious period (1947.51).

Meeting other students who were, variously, G.I. Bill vets, refugees from the Holocaust,

participants in NAACP and SDA [Students for Democratic Action]. Taking poetry courses from

F. O. Matthiessen, a self-described socialist. I was pretty apolitical myself at

Radcliffe, so there’s hope for undergraduates who are just watching, as I was, what goes

on.

In my thirties, the Civil Rights movement in the South, the writings of James Baldwin,

Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., the violence of the opposition to the black struggle

for justice and dignity. I began to grasp how racism deforms the racist, turns one into a

person who will kill or persecute out of fear, or permit killing and persecution to be

done in one’s name while leading a genteel life. That movement showed many white Americans

what our society looked like from the perspective of its second-class citizens.

It also modeled the spirit of active participation in social change, infusing in turn the

anti-war movement, the women’s movement, the lesbian/gay movement. That participatory

spirit, critical and activist, is linked to artistic creation in ways I later described

(in What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics)–both require the

radical imagination of the not-yet, the what-if. In these movements, and from people I

knew then, I learned the possibilities of an engaged art.

From 1980 on, as Reaganomics opened the way to out-of-control corporate power, I began

turning to history and to Marx’s writings for a different grasp on events. At a time when

Marx was considered a dead letter, I was finding his words very much alive. The sixties

were declared buried, the women’s movement pronounced dead, then the collapse of the

Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain were hailed as the ultimate victory of democracy. Yet I

saw democracy–in the sense of that participatory spirit, which to survive must always

become more inclusive–shrinking visibly here in the US: the richest becoming richer and

the poor poorer, access to resources accumulating in fewer and fewer hands. This has

influenced how I see both my art and my life.

The arts, a crucial human resource, are hated and mistrusted by capital unless they can be

commoditized. The past two decades have been a hostile, demoralizing time in this country

for anyone who wants to participate in building a more inclusive and hopeful social order,

an artistic life fueled by anything but money. These, too, have been important political

lessons.

Does poetry play a role in social change.

Yes, where poetry is liberative language, connecting the fragments within us, connecting

us to others like and unlike ourselves, replenishing our desire. It’s potentially

catalytic speech because it’s more than speech: it is associative, metaphoric,

dialectical, visual, musical; in poetry words can say more than they mean and mean more

than they say. In a time of frontal assaults both on language and on human solidarity,

poetry can remind us of all we are in danger of losing–disturb us, embolden us out of

resignation.

How has your refusal of the National Medal for the Arts had an impact on your life and

work.

My refusal of the arts medal was immediate and instinctive. My life and work had impact on

the decision more than the other way around. If you are living a certain kind of life,

trying to do certain kinds of work, feeling connected with certain kinds of people,

certain traditions, a decision like that flows naturally from your own premises.

from Radcliffe Quarterly (Fall 1998). Online Source

Michael Klein

from "A Rich Life: Adrienne Rich on Poetry,

Politics, and Personal Revelation"

Boston Pheonix (June 1999)

Q: With The Dream

of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977, your poems became more political and more

far-reaching. Coming out felt less about disclosure and more about pure revolution. There

was an incredible sense of how that choice affected other people apart from yourself. How

can lesbian poets today, who for the most part are already out with their first book,

become part of American intellectual life the way that you have.

A: The dilemma for a

21-year-old lesbian poet who is already out may well be that so much is already

acknowledged and written about and published. How do you enter those conversations that

are already taking place, and the even wi

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