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

From a starting premise that poetry is little more than a marginal activity in the U. S., where poets lead "interstitial lives," often strapped for time and money, Rich explores the role and ultimately collective power of poetry. She talks of the influence of Muriel Rukeyser, the most "integrative," unheralded of poets, and, to some extent, of other principled activists such as Barbara Deming, Alva Myrdal, poets June Jordan and Audre Lord, and poet-politician, Vaclav Havel. What Is Found There is also an effective barometer of Rich's own "education" as a poet: from the early questioning of the high gods of modernism such as T. S. Eliot and Williams; to the initial liberating influence of Stevens, and later understanding and repudiation of his racial language; to being a major participant in the women's communal poetry and publishing movement. Rich's poetic methods also shifted accordingly from a somewhat ordered formalism to increasing use of more open forms, and often fragmented language. Throughout Rich seems to have accepted that poetry was a necessity, a "fierce, destabilizing force, a wave pulling you further out than you wanted to be," suggesting, imploring," You have to change your life." And in the final section, "What if?" Rich pushes further, exploring poetry of revolution, poetry of change, poetry that describes what is, and indicates what can be. In a somewhat Shelleyan mood, Rich concludes with a suggestion of the ideal, the transformative capabilities of the "revolutionary" poet, as cited in the following excerpt from What is Found There:

   Over so many millennia, so many cultures, humans have reached into
   preexisting nature and made art: to celebrate, to drive off evil, to
   nourish memory, to conjure the desired visitation.

   The revolutionary artist, the relayer of possibility, draws on such powers,
   in opposition to a technocratic society's hatred of multiformity, hatred of
   the natural world, hatred of the body, hatred of darkness and women, hatred
   of disobedience. The revolutionary poet loves people, rivers, other
   creatures, stones, trees inseparably from art, is not ashamed of any of
   these loves, and for them conjures a language that is public, intimate,
   inviting, terrifying, and beloved. (250)

With Dark Fields of the Republic, which takes its title from F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Rich continues her dialogue with America, speaking again as a citizen, questioning received values, in a voice which is "a form of despair, not resignation." At the same time, the poems range further, assuming a more global historical stance for her "theatre of voices," conversations with other women, interrogations of war, the Holocaust, guilt, and responsibility. Rich's note to the sequence "Then or Now," drawn in part from correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, announces what I take to be the thematic thread of many of the poems in the volume, the urgency or need to respond to "the continuing pressure of events." The opening poem, "What Kind of Times are These," (quoted in part) with its references to Brecht and Mandelstam sets the stage, in a sense, for the tone of the book, in direct, although occasionally somewhat hyperbolic language: