Week Three: Adrienne Rich

           While Merwin used the poetic “I” to explore the Self, Adrienne Rich seems to use her “I” (and “you” and “we” and “us”) to explore social and political issues and their relationship to self in The School among the Ruins. The “I” makes her poetry intimate and personal for the reader even though many of her topics are very global. Her writing is so much more than “’grinding a political axe’” (“Blood, Bread, and Poetry” 53)—she begs her reader to see political issues as things that affect everyone’s “I”—as issues that are more than headlines.  Placing herself so prominently in her poems also allows her to emphasize her philosophy that a poem is “not a single, encapsulated event” (54), but in fact is a snapshot from the progression of her life.  Using the vulnerable “I” also puts Rich “face to face with both terror and anger” (56) in a clear way. But she also frequently eschews the I in favor of “you” or “we.” Her “we” and ”us” confront large, frightening concepts and issues together. These second-person pronouns also emphasize the immediacy of the issues she’s addressing—they prevent us from reading with too much distance. I think this strategy is particularly clear in “Ritual Acts.”

It’s clear throughout all these poems that Adrienne Rich sees the power of pronouns , but that awareness is made explicit in “Transparencies.” While talking about known things, Rich says, “any child on the playground knows/That asked your favorite word/in a game/you always named a thing, a quality, freedom or river/(never a pronoun never God or War)” (The School Among the Ruins 49). Pronouns make things real, make things close, and Rich uses that reality and closeness effectively.

I very much enjoyed reading Rich. I wasn’t expecting to from the moment I heard “political” used to describe her, but her beautiful language and honest, straightforward opinions won me over quickly. Where I expected to find angry rants I instead found observations as gorgeous as they were keen. Out of all of them, the poem that particularly resonated with me is “The Eye.” I think it says beautifully how different this war is from all previous wars—we are in the eye of the war, safe, far-removed, and largely unaware of the real effects of its storm. Although this poem, dated 2002, was (I assume) written in response to the shock of the events of 9/11, I think it is extremely relevant to the cultural attitude today. While my husband was deployed I was frequently frustrated by people who, upon learning that he was in Afghanistan, told me that they saw on the news that Obama ended the war and everyone’s coming home and there’s no more danger. They told me these things while my husband zipped up body bags, attended memorial services, and received enemy fire more days than he didn’t. Every one of those well-meaning people were in the eye of the war but completely unaware of it.

I love that Rich dates her poems—knowing context gives them a very specific depth and meaning, especially since most were writing in and around a very difficult, shocking time in our history. But I also liked ignoring the dates sometimes. Her words are so applicable to so many times and situations—“The Eye” is a perfect memorial to the now-shattered peace that existed in the days before 9/11, but the idea of a war’s eye is one that transcends that moment in history. I’m very interested to talk more about her, particularly the second section of the book, which, in its specificity, was somewhat less accessible to me than the other parts of the volume.