Adrienne Rich died on Tuesday, March 27, at her home in Santa Cruz, California. She was 82.
Katha Pollit writes in The New Yorker:
Rich's career reminds us that poetry can be more than aesthetic, more than lyrics of personal feeling—although she wrote many beautiful lyrics. It can engage with the biggest issues of its day and speak to a large and passionate readership. There are risks in taking those issues on: the poem as sermon, as slogan, as leaflet. (One of her books, in fact, is called “Leaflets.”) Some of her poems, indeed, fell into those categories. But in book after book, Rich triumphed. She took on our gravest perplexities and injustices—inequality of race and gender and sexuality and class, war and its consequences, the despoiling of nature and language—and asked the biggest question about them: Who would we be if we could change our world? I don’t think she knew the answer. No one does. In “Prospective Immigrants Please Note,” she wrote,
The door itself
makes no promises
It is only a door.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/03/adrienne-rich-katha-pollitt.html#ixzz1rVOw8RmL