Dear [poet friend],
I enjoy listening each week to Curtis Fox's short (15-minute) public radio program, "Poetry off the shelf." You very likely know it, both as part of your history and because it's produced by the Poetry Foundation, which does Poetry magazine. Fox usually has a bright younger guest poet join him in looking at a little of the work of another poet. This week the question was something like "Should Adrienne Rich be the poet laureate of the Occupy movement?"
Not a promising query — the Occupy movement needs a poet laureate about as much as it needs a president and a first and 2nd vice president. Even Adrienne Rich.
Fox may be off the mark in this instance, but he's not dumb. And his guest thankfully spent little time dispatching the question.
But they also read and talked intelligently about two Rich poems, neither of which I knew, and both of them are fine, brilliant in the very English and Scottish senses of the word. One, the shorter of the two poems, is called simply "Wait," written just as the 2nd American invasion of Iraq was getting underway. It appears addressed to an American soldier sent by his anonymous elders to fight and risk inflicting and enduring injury and death in that war. "They never told you." I think it the more difficult of the two poems to the tin ear, and your audience must be assumed to have such disabled ears. What little you said of your editor's first response suggests it.
I'm inclined to incorporate this note into a current Reckonings post, but I won't identify you other than as "a poet friend," and of course won't use your address. [Our own home grown editor of our monthly newsletter in the community that is my home] advises us well not to take our friends' names into our ventures on the web without their permission.
I have no idea if Reckonings has more than a half-dozen readers, most of whom are surely my children. There is ample encouraging provision for online response to Reckonings posts, but the last one I had was probably in aught2. I gave the journal up while in Norway, but am happy to return to it now in a blessedly peaceful place and time. Roosevelt grandchildren and great-grandchildren should always put fame where it belongs.
Wait
by Adrienne Rich
In paradise every
the desert wind is rising
third thought
in hell there are no thoughts
is of earth
sand screams against your government
issued tent
hell’s noise in your nostrils crawl
into your ear-shell
wrap yourself in no-thought
wait no place for the little lyric
wedding-ring glint the reason why
on earth
they never told you
“Wait,” from The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 by Adrienne Rich. Copyright © 2006 by Adrienne Rich.
The second of Rich's poems is "What kinds of times are these," and it's that question and Rich's response that put me in mind of your wishing to expand upon your writing about the Occupy movement. I thought yes, her times are ours, and to add some brief discussion of that poem might expand your writing. See what you think.
I drew from my listening that Rich took the title from Bertold Brecht, and Curtis Fox's guest poet spoke of Rich's themes of "poetry of witness" and empathic sensibility, our lack of memory and community, and the notion that Zucotti Park is not a physical place, nor is the true academy, the grove of trees, the meeting place. "It's necessary to talk about trees."
I'll try to find the poem, though you may have it.
That poem seems suitably short and apropos of your own current theme, and I think it lovely. Not prosiac language of course, but lovely.
Cheers and good hunting,
John
PS: I noted that Rich, like you, is 10 years my senior. I have at least a decade of good learning ahead of me! (Joan Rivers is closer to my age.)
What Kind of Times Are These [I include a link to Adrienne Rich reading "What Kind of Times Are These," but I must warn you, dear reader, not to look at the subtitles, for they are wildly inaccurate renderings of her reading. Listen to her voice.]
by Adrienne Rich
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—ghost-ridden crossroads, leaf
mold paradise:I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.
“What Kind of Times Are These”. © 2002, 1995 by Adrienne Rich, from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001 by Adrienne Rich.
Adrienne Rich, 1929 —
Vocation: Poet
Executive summary: An atlas of the difficult world
University: Radcliffe College (1951)
Visiting professor, Brandeis University (1972-73)
Visiting professor, Scripps College (1983-84)
Visiting professor, Stanford University (1984-86)
Professor of English, Stanford University (1986-93)
National Book Award for Poetry 1974 for Diving into the Wreck
Bollingen Prize in Poetry 2003
MacArthur Fellowship 1994-99
Guggenheim Fellowship 1952
Guggenheim Fellowship 1961
Phi Beta Kappa Society
American Academy of Arts and Letters
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Women Against Pornography
Books:
A Change of World (1951, poetry)
Necessities of Life: Poems 1962-1965 (1966, poetry)
Diving into the Wreck (1973, poetry)
The Dream of a Common Language (1978, poetry)
The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984 (1984, poetry)
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1986)
Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988 (1989, poetry)
An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 (1991, poetry)
Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970 (1993, poetry)
What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993, essays)
Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995, poetry)
Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998 (1999, poetry)
Fox: Poems 1998-2000 (2001, poetry)
Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (2001, essays)