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The Road Taken: Adrienne Rich in the 1990s - Poem
Literary Review, Summer, 2000 by Carol Bere
It's only a branch like any other green with the flare of life in it and if I hold this end, you the other that means it's broken broken between us, broken despite us broken and therefore dying broken by force, broken by lying green, with the flare of life in it
And in the title poem, "Midnight Salvage," with its shifting voices, the use of paired colons, which seem to intensify connections or sequences of thought, Rich suggests the turmoil of the poet who must speak out, must act, yet as a visiting professor is caught in a situation where "nothing will change," where she does "not want anymore to sit under such a window's / deep embrasure, wisteria bulging on spring air / in that borrowed chair / with its collegiate shield at a borrowed desk/ Keats' death mask / and the english cemetery all so under control and so eternal" in an environment of "young faces already straining for / the production of slender testaments/to swift reading and current thinking." Later in the poem, Rich's voice shifts markedly from the "conscripted" poet reporting for duty in the classroom to a sense of despair, even outrage in a relentless combination of images that invokes Whitman, and suggests perhaps the impotence of poetry as agency, while implying the triumph of the debilitating trade-offs and hypocrisy of "commerce":
But neither was expecting in my time to witness this:: wasn't deep lucid or mindful you might say enough to look through history's bloodshot eyes into this commerce this dreadnought wreck cut loose from all vows, oaths, patents, compacts, promises:: To see Not O my Captain fallen cold & dead by the assassin's hand but cold alive & cringing:: drinking with the assassins in suit of noir Hong Kong silk pushing his daughter in her famine-waisted flamingo gown out on the dance floor with the traffickers in nerve gas saying to them Go for it and to the girl Get with it
In the "The Night has a Thousand Eyes," a surrealistic, dream-like trip through New York City, "the east side with its trinkets/the west side with its memories," one of the most affecting poems in the collection, the poet sympathetically evokes remembrances of Miles Davis, poet Julia de Burgos, Hart Crane, and Muriel Rukeyser, the most "integrative" of poets,(2) perhaps the guiding spirit of the sequence, whose voice had been stilled, her struggle unabating, and her poetry under-appreciated:
After one stroke she looks at the river Remembers her name--Muriel Writes it in her breath on the big windowpane never again perhaps to walk in the city freely but here is her landscape this old industrial building converted for artists her river the Lordly Hudson in Europe or the East her mind on that water widening
The epigraph to Midnight Salvage, an excerpt from a letter of George Oppen to June Oppen Degnan, suggests the overriding issue of the collection, the question or the potential for happiness in a period of global turmoil, of individual suffering in the world: "I don't know how to measure happiness. The issue is happiness, there is no other issue one has a right to think about for other people, to think about politically, but I don't know how to measure happiness." In "Camino Real," driving south in California to see her son, Rich contemplates Charles Olson's statement, "Can you afford not to make / the magical study / which happiness is?" She determines "--that happiness is not to be / mistrusted or wasted / though it ferment in grief, "and responds to Oppen's question about the possibilities for happiness with relatively unqualified optimism(3):
