In “Dislocations: Seven Scenarios,” Adrienne Rich depicts seven very distinct situation and continues using pronouns strategically. This time, however, it is less clear to me what, exactly, her strategy is. This poem is intriguing to me because I found it very powerful though I don’t quite feel able to articulate why. Continuing in my fixation with Rich’s pronoun usage, I was looking for a formula in “Seven Scenarios.” All of her poetry seems so intentional I expected to find a clear pattern, but after reading and re-reading many times I’m still not sure what I’m seeing that I like so much.
As in “The School among the Ruins,”
she’s still demanding that the reader acknowledge how thin the lines are
between the comfort we enjoy now and what could be, that seemed clear to me.
While in “The School Among the Ruins,” Rich paralleled the trauma of the events
of September 11, 2011, with the wartime traumas faced by other countries, the
first section of “Seven Scenarios” places the reader in the situation of an
elderly immigrant. Though the finger-pointing “you” is only used once here, I
felt that once was enough to bring me into the role of the adult immigrant. I
thought this was a clever reversal of the stereotypical angry foreign neighbor—I
liked how Rich essentially said, “Don’t get mad, this could be you someday.” Rich
also employs the second-person pronoun in the second section of the poem. I am
much less sure of the circumstances of this section—is this about an addict? A
patient? A prisoner? But regardless, Rich forces empathy from the reader (even
the confused reader like me) when we find ourselves clutching for bread. I
think this section is beautiful and moving, but I don’t think I would feel
comfortable defining the situation here yet. I think it speaks to Rich’s
effectiveness that I don’t feel I need to know what her poems are about to feel
their power.
In the third, fourth, and seventh
sections Rich moves to third person. My initial reaction is that Rich allowed
the third person in the sections that are somehow familiar yet distant to the
readers. Perhaps where we can easily insert ourselves she sees no need to push
us? The seventh section presents a lovely introduction to a man about to leave
for a Doctors without Borders stint and the fourth is the story of an under-funded
Veterans hospital. Both of these situations seem fairly familiar to me yet
outside of my every-day realm, so my hypothesis held true for me there. I’m
less sure about the meaning of the third section. It begins discussing an infection
that “drinks like a drinker/ whatever it can” (87). Immediately, reading the
word “infection” in a politically-minded poet’s work I jumped to literal
infection and assumed this poem was about AIDS, but the final line which says
that the solipsist is still safe made me doubt that interpretation. Since solipsism
is a philosophical idea, I began to think the infection may be one as well. So
could the infection represent hatred or racism? Either way, this fit in with my
idea that topics of familiar distance receive third-person treatment.
Section five seems a little more
personal, so using the second person makes sense here as well. Section six,
however, initially seemed to destroy my theory—its message of perceived failure
seems like a universally relatable topic. Then I realized that it’s the only
one that is both vague enough and specific enough that (I think) most everyone
can immediately relate to—not in a second-hand, I-saw-on-the-news kind of way,
but a really personal experience. So I’m going to place it outside my theory as
a different kind of second-person voice from Rich.
I’m unsure of everything, but I
like it—it’s a comfortable uncertainty.
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