One of the more curious themes of the coverage of Adrienne Rich’s death this week is that people seem to want to rescue her from her political beliefs. David Orr’s piece in the New York Times today is representative of that, with the (in my view) unfortunate headline of “The Poet Beyond the Anger.” You could argue that Orr did not choose that title, but then he forges on with this:
But for Ms. Rich, as for any real poet, the question is always: How do we read her work not as social history, but as poetry?
Was this question was asked of, say, Allen Ginsberg, when he died? I am drawing a blank. But even if someone did ask, isn’t it fundamentally absurd to divorce someone’s writing from their circumstances? Particularly when that someone was as clear as Rich that she did not consider there to be a stark line between the two?
In 1997, as some of the older among you will remember, Rich ruffled quite a few feathers when she refused to accept the National Medal for the Arts. She wrote a short letter explaining why:
Anyone familiar with my work from the early Sixties on knows that I believe in art’s social presence—as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright… There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
More than a few journalists found this move inscrutable. “Huh? Is it a medal — or a napkin ring?” whined one silly columnist in the Washington Post. It was the complacent Clinton era, and before Bush II came along to startle us I guess the whole “dinner table of power” thing seemed, to some, passé.
But we know better now, don’t we?
Later in Orr’s piece, he says of Rich, and of Sylvia Plath, too, that they were “great poets of rage.” Indeed, they were. But their rage was specific, not general. Female rage was, and is, a real thing. But it is not ahistorical. It does not emerge fully formed from the ether. It grows from experience — in Rich’s own case, that of being assumedly lesser than men, and of being a lesbian. To try to lift her out of that is, to say the least, disrespectful, to use a polite-lady word for “galling.”
I do not think that Orr intends to insult, of course. I imagine that when male critics do this, when they refuse to acknowledge that women write as women, they think it’s a compliment. Because they are treating women the same way as they’d treat men. I can only speak for myself, of course, but I’d prefer instead that we consider that the way we treat men — as presumptively “real” poets, “beyond anger” — is in need of revision.
I’m taking that point from Rich herself. One of my favourite essays of hers is an early one from 1979, called “Taking Women Students Seriously,” which I came across in a class on law school pedagogy a long time ago. She suggests that the solution is not to train women students to “think like men”:
Men in general think badly: in disjuncture from their personal lives, claiming objectivity where the most irrational passions seethe, losing, as Virginia Woolf observed, their senses in the pursuit of professionalism… To think like a woman means thinking critically, refusing to accept the givens, making connections between facts and ideas which men have left unconnected. It means remembering that every mind resides in a body…
That’s right: she said every mind. It would do us well, I think, well over thirty years after she wrote that, to consider it.
