The Woman Behind the Curtain Pulling the Levers: Talking with Zinzi Clemmons
Zinzi Clemmons on What We Lose, representations of blackness, and life’s influences on writing.
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Posts Tagged: Adrienne Rich
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Achy Obejas
Achy Obejas discusses her new collection, The Tower of the Antilles, what she’s learned from translating works of others, and why we should all read poetry every day.
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Reclaiming the Language of Pop Culture: Reversible by Marisa Crawford
Marisa Crawford’s Reversible is an evocative collection, showcasing the ways in which pop culture saturates us with meaning, and how it teaches us to become.
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The Rumpus Interview with Belle Boggs
Belle Boggs discusses The Art of Waiting about navigating through the difficulties of conception and fertility treatment.
...moreIn Which Her Name Does Not Disappear
As I take up the task of reading and rereading these often prophetic poems, much becomes clear to me simply from the visible letters on the page—and yet I sense, too, that I cannot refuse an interpretation of what is inscribed beneath and within those letters in the invisible ink of Rich’s poetic genius. Writing […]
...moreTo Reconcile Music and Ethics
If you want to change the world, why write poetry? Wayne Koestenbaum, writing for the New York Times, takes a moment to appreciate Adrienne Rich’s body of work via the recently released Collected Poems, focusing on Rich’s ability to sing impassioned with ethical concerns.
...moreThe Evolution of Adrienne Rich
Over at the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson marks the publication of Adrienne Rich’s collected works with an examination of the incredible arc of her life and career. And instead of condemning her many transformations as a kind of flightiness, he reminds us how admirable it is for a person to be able to change as […]
...moreThe Moment of Change is the Only Poem
In poetry words can say more than they mean and mean more than they say. Over at the New Yorker, Claudia Rankine writes about the transformations Adrienne Rich underwent in search of ethics and the willful “I,” from the brief attempt at objectivity in her earliest poems to her refusal of the National Medal for […]
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Jen Fitzgerald’s Poetry Mixtape #2: Poets on Poetry and Art
I’m spending National Poetry Month at the Millay Colony, former home of Edna St. Vincent Millay. My colleague and friend, poet and writer Jen Fitzgerald, will be writing the Mixtape column this month—and we are all lucky for it. Enjoy Jen’s robust selections and I’ll see you in May.
...moreOr Smash the Mold Straight Off
If this sounds like a Women’s Lib rap, baby, it is. For The New Republic, Michelle Dean writes a lovely and winding essay on the life and feminism of Adrienne Rich: its origins in breaking meter, discovery through therapy, her correspondence with Hayden Carruth, the suicide of her husband, and culminating in her National Book […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Idra Novey
Swati Khurana talks with novelist and translator Idra Novey about the challenges and joys of translation, the idiosyncrasies of language, the inextricable reception of women’s writing and women’s bodies, and much more.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Pedagogy of the Oppressed
[Boston] was a map out of the damage of my self-awareness and into some new evidence of beauty.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Why Jihadists Love Postmodern Poetry
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire returns with a powerful take on fascism and violence and postmodernism.
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The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show: Beth Bachmann
In Episode 8 of The Rumpus Late Nite Poetry Show, poet Beth Bachmann chats about her new collection, Do Not Rise, Dolly Parton, and the demands of lyric poetry.
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The Rumpus Interview with Darcey Steinke
Darcey Steinke talks about her new novel, Sister Golden Hair, motherlessness, the Southern cult of femininity, and how becoming a woman has changed since she came of age in a small city in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
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The Big Idea: Eula Biss
On Immunity author Eula Biss speaks to Suzanne Koven about mythology, personal freedom, and the history of vaccines.
...moreRobert Hass Wins the Wallace Stevens Award
Joining the ranks of John Ashbery, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Adrienne Rich, Field Guide author Robert Hass was honored with the highly lucrative Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets last Tuesday. You can read one of his famous prose poems here.
...moreDavid Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Genius of Adrienne Rich
I’m surprised by the amiable but lukewarm reception Ange Mlinko gives in The Nation to Adrienne Rich’s Later Poems: Selected and New. The 500+ retrospective was published late last year. Mlinko holds at arm’s length the charms of Rich’s later fragmentary lyrics. Succinctly, and in a manner I am wholly on board with, Mlinko defines […]
...moreThe Rumpus Saturday Essay: Me Be Pretty One Day
When I was younger and lonelier and knew more about other people than I did about myself, I thought
...more#AdrienneRich
While putting linen into a hat box and then putting the hat box into a cardboard box, because I’m moving from the mountain to the city, I get a call about Adrienne Rich’s death.
...moreThe Last Poem I Loved: “Modotti” by Adrienne Rich
I didn’t have time to be devastated on the day Adrienne Rich died, but I still couldn’t keep back the tears. Like so many others, Rich was The One to me, America’s greatest living everything I ever wanted to be: a titan of poetry, an icon of feminism. The woman who articulated the fundamental truth […]
...moreAdrienne Rich, 1929 – 2012
Adrienne Rich, one of the preeminent poets of the 20th and early 21st centuries, has died at the age of 82, according to the LA Times. I don’t really have much to add–she was an amazing poet and powerful presence on the poetic scene, and her influence can be seen in the work of tons […]
...moreA Struggle at the Roots of the Mind
I don’t know if I’m the only youngish reader to have this chip on my shoulder, but I always sort of assume that poems by older people get mellower. Let me say it again: Rich’s lines are harrowing, are incensed and knifing.
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