The Road Taken: Adrienne Rich in the 1990s - Poem

I have never believed that poetry is an escape from history, and I do not think that it is more, or less, than food, shelter health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

The question for the North American poet is how to bear witness to a reality from which the public--and maybe part of the poet--wants, or is persuaded it wants, to turn away.

From Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993)

Casting about for an appropriate poem about spring for his "Poet's Choice column in the Washington Post (May 16, 1999), Robert Haas, former U. S. Poet Laureate, spoke of a strange dissatisfaction, a realization that with violence in Kosovo, and at home in Columbine that he needed "to read something with more salt in it and more darkness." Haas selects "Shattered Head," from Adrienne Rich's sixteenth, and most recent volume, Midnight Salvage (1999), a moving, somewhat mysterious, not necessarily transparent poem that characteristically offers no easy consolations. Like Haas, I'm not sure I fully understand the poem, although generations of human suffering, perhaps exploitation, and general indifference are implied. What is important in "Shattered Head," and perhaps more so throughout Midnight Salvage, is the range and intensity of Rich's concern for human life in all of its complexity, her refusal to settle for obvious bromides, and the overriding general fearlessness of her position, which appears to intensify with each new book.

In the rough outlines of the forty-seven line poem, a person, "a life hauls itself uphill," coming upon a skull, "a shattered head on the breast / of a wooded hill/laid down there endlessly so / tendrils soaked into matted compost / become a root." The poem opens out as the speaker comments:

   You can walk by such a place, the earth is made of them
   where the stretched tissue of field or woods is humid
   with beloved matter
   the soothseekers have withdrawn
   you feel no ghost, only a sporic chorus
   when that place utters its worn sigh
   let us have peace

Yet rather than offering facile regeneration solutions at this point, as Haas rightly suggests many poets would have, Rich concludes with a response from the "unappeased" skull:

   And the shattered head answers back
   I believed I was loved, I believe I loved,
   who did this to us?

Unappeased, resolutely discontent, bold, revolutionary--all of these terms could be applied to Rich, who described herself in the critical sequence, "Sources" (1981-82), as the woman "with a mission, not to win prizes, but to change the laws of history." For almost fifty years, Rich's fierce intelligence has been leading the way for generations of poets, challenging received ideals, changing lives, giving voice to the disenfranchised. Always, her effort has been to connect: to discover relationships between the tangled, fragmented peripheries of our inner lives and the seemingly unrelated events of history; to understand the interdependencies of our sexual and political lives; and, perhaps with renewed or more reconsidered focus in recent years, to achieve a voice that is at once both intensely personal and public (interview with Montenegro).

Rich's career (and life) has been marked by major shifts in gear: from early beginnings as a prodigiously talented, somewhat traditional poet to a far more experimental, even revisionist poet; from marriage to lesbian, feminist, and outspoken political activist; and from young wife, mother, and daughter who was "Split at the root, neither Gentile nor Jew, / Yankee nor Rebel" to later reclaimant of her Jewish roots. Criticism of Rich has also followed a similar trajectory: advocates of the earlier Rich now mourn the loss of her more "comfortable" poems; radical feminist (and largely favorable) critics of Rich have divided some readers; for others, she has been a bellwether of women poets' potential for power and influence. Charges of excessive didacticism dogged her middle and, to some extent, later career, and for some critics, undercut the scope of her achievement.

Yet with little attention to the bottom line, Rich has made it clear, says poet Carol Muske, that "she is in possession of a quality that few American poets are ever called upon to reveal--courage. She has had the courage to turn her back on a literary `future' that seemed established and undertake a whole new definition of the future of poetry. She has had the courage to stand up to her detractors and critics for whom misogyny was a cultural imperative, and make it stick" (Muske). And at seventy, when many poets might be bogged down in self-reflection or be deemed guilty of repetition, Rich has risen above the noise, "kept the dialogue going," probing the world through her poetry, using longer, more expansive poetic forms, more innovative combinations of language, exploring the issues, "which after all are our lives." In the 1990s alone, Rich has produced three volumes of poetry and a collection of prose: An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991); What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993); Dark Fields of the Republic (1995); and Midnight Salvage (1999).(1) Another volume of prose, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations, will be published early in 2001.