The Life and Career of Adrienne Cecile Rich

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The Life and Career of Adrienne Cecile Rich

• Presentation by
• Amanda Holloway

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The Early Years

• Born May 16, 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland
• Rich describes her childhood household as white
  and middle-class.full of books, with a father
  who encouraged me to write.
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• The eldest daughter to Arnold, a Jewish doctor of
  pathology and professor at Johns Hopkins
  University, and Helen Jones Rich, a southern
  protestant, composer and pianist.
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• Her mother gave up a possible professional music
  career to raise and teach her children. She home
  schooled Adrienne until the fourth grade.
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• Adrienne always desired the approval of her
  father, who tutored her in the art of writing
  poetry.
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The Beginning of a Wonderful Career

• Rich graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe
  College in 1951.
• This same year, she was awarded the Yale Younger
  Poets Prize for her book, A Change of World. The
  judge for this award was W.H. Auden, a writer
  whom Adriennes style was inspired by.
• Rich restrained from speaking of issues she felt
  strong about in her early work. Feminism and
  male condescension were some of the issues which
  she thought about deeply.
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• In 1953, Rich married Alfred Conrad, a Harvard
  economist. The two moved to Massachusetts where
  Adrienne had 3 sons.
• The next few years were emotionally and
  artistically difficult because of her increasing
  struggle with conflicts over the prescribed
  roles of womanhood versus those of artistry, over
  tensions between sexual and creative roles of
  love and anger.

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The Changing Period

• In 1955, Rich published book was The Diamond
  Cutters and Other Poems, which gained her a
  reputation as an elegant controlled stylist.
• Rich was claimed to have an elegant technique,
  chiseled formation, and restrained emotional
  content.
• In 1956, Adrienne started dating her poems to
  underscore their existence within a context.
• Her personal conflict and sexual alienation were
  being combined with social and political forces
  in the 60s. She felt very strongly for the
  civil rights movement, antiwar movement, and
  womens movement.
• During the 1960s shifted toward feminist themes
  and stylistic experimentation.

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Continued

• In 1966 she moved to New York with her husband
  where she took a job as a remedial English
  teacher to poor, black, and third world students
  entering college.
• During this time the works of James Baldwin and
  Simone de Beauvoir influenced her.
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Finding Herself

• Rich continued experimenting with form and to
  deal with the experiences and aspirations of
  women from a feminist perspective.
• Since 1976, Adrienne Rich has lived with Michelle
  Cliff, a writer and editor.
• Rich is very active in gay and lesbian rights
  movements, reproductive freedom, and the
  progressive Jewish movement New Jewish Agenda.
• In 1981 Rich received the Fund for Human Dignity

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Continued

• In 1997 Rich refused the National Medal for the
  Arts award which would be presented by president
  Clinton. In a letter to The Las Angeles Times
  Book Review, she wrote, Over the past two
  decades I have witnessed the increasingly brutal
  impact of racial and economic injustice in our
  country. The radical disparities of wealth and
  power in America are widening at a devastating
  rate. A President cannot meaningfully honor
  certain token artists while the people at large
  are so dishonored.               

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The Works of Adrienne Rich

• A Change of World (1951)
• The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955)
• Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963)
• The Necessities of Life (1966)
• Leaflets (1969)
• The Will to Change (1971)
• Diving into the Wreck (1973)
• Twenty-One Love Poems (1976)
• The Dream of a Common Language (1978)
• A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981)
• The Fact of a Doorframe Poems Selected and New
  (1984)
• Your Native Land, Your Life (1986)
• An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991)
• Dark Fields of the Republic Poems 1991-1995
  (1995)

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Awards, Prizes and Fellowships

• 2 Gugghenheim Fellowships
• Fellowship of the Acadamy of American Poets
• Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
• Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay
  Task Force
• Lambda Book Award
• Poets Prize
• Lenore Marshall Nation Award
• MacArthur Fellowship
• Tanning Award for Mastery in the Art of Poetry
• Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award

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Quotes

• I am a feminist because I feel endangered,
  psychically and physically, by this society and
  because I believe that the womens movement is
  saying that we have come to an edge of history
  when men insofar as they are embodiments of the
  patriarchal idea have become dangerous to
  children and other living things, themselves
  included.
• If you are trying to transform a brutalized
  society into one where people can live in dignity
  and hope, you begin with the empowering of the
  most powerless. You build from the ground up.

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Diving into the Wreck

• Consists of ten free verse stanzas.
• Written in first person
• First published in 1973, after Rich started
  writing very seriously about feminist issues.
• There are many ways to interpret the meaning of
  this poem.
• The poem narrates the speakers quest as she
  explores a sunken ship to discover the cause of
  the disaster and to salvage whatever treasures
  remain.
• The sea is a traditional literary symbol for the
  unconscious.

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Continued

• To dive is to probe beneath the surface for
  hidden meanings, and to learn about ones
  submerged desires and emotions. The dive in this
  case is to find knowledge and power.
• When submerged she becomes both man and woman,
  meaning there is no difference between either.
  we I am she I am he.
• The diver becomes the boat, cargo, figurehead, an
  observer, an explorer and a participant in the
  disaster. we are the half destroyed
  instruments/that once held to a course.
• The book of myths may be the metaphorical
  equivalent for the language which has trapped
  and liberated women. Or it may be a book which
  tells of mens adventures and experiences but not
  a womens.
• The wreck may suggest the lost treasures of women
  in ancient stories and how women became
  submissive to men in the Western world.

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Continued

• The forcefulness may come from the wish not to
  huddle in the corner but to explore everything,
  in this case the shipwreck.
• The diver goes into the ocean, which some see as
  the beginning of life and evolution, and they try
  to determine what went wrong between men and
  women.