Hilary Holladay - The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography

Adrienne Rich was a powerful woman. Throughout her long life and career, she marshaled the power of her formidable mind in the service of art and social justice. Her father, a brilliant scientist and scholar, made sure she understood the power of knowledge and the power of language. It was implied throughout his many years of insistent, bullying tutelage that if she could write better than everyone else of her generation, she would have his undying respect and a place in the annals of immortal literature. An assimilated Jew who declared himself a deist, he held out to her the possibility of life after death, if only she would devote her entire being to the art form he had chosen for her. Dr. Arnold Richs message was so irresistible, she could hardly distinguish between his directive and her desire to fulfill it.

She gladly gave her life to writing, especially the writing of poetry, for poetry was as close to a religion as anything she would ever know. From a young age, she saw herself as a chosen person whose life mattered a great deal. She had her self-doubts and vulnerabilities, but she knew she was smart and, if she followed orders (her fathers and her own), she was certain she could achieve her lofty goals. Her supreme self-confidence was an early source of strength that translated to power as she began moving methodically up the rungs of literary recognition while she was still an undergraduate at Radcliffe.

Although she was diagnosed in her early twenties with rheumatoid arthritis, which chased and whipped her for the rest of her days, Adrienne Rich also possessed the power of enormous energya gift of untold value to someone of her acumen and ambition. Her sister, Cynthia Rich, told me in the first of hundreds of email messages we traded over a period of five years, Like my father, my sister was a genius who didnt need much rest and wrote many letters every day while writing essays and books and lectures and reviews [and also] writing poetry while teaching and cooking (and raising children and dealing with physical pain)and more.

In addition to her intelligence, willpower, and energy, she had the imagination and curiosity she needed to develop and sustain her creative powers for a lifetime. Well into early middle age, the fruits of those creative powers were almost enough to satisfy her. But when her writing flagged in the face of the burdens and responsibilities of motherhood, she began to take a fresh look at her life as an artist. She wondered what it would be like to stop pretending that a universal voice meant anything other than masquerading as a man. She noticed that, yes, the literary canon was full of poems about women, but they were almost exclusively by men. She would work to change that by taking up the subject herself. This decision prefigured her life as a radical feminist by nearly a decade.

In Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, composed sporadically from 1958 to 1960, she wrote in the third person of how her choices differed from her passive mothers: Nervy, glowering, your daughter / wipes the teaspoons, grows another way. And at the end of that poem, the first unmistakable harbinger of the feminist powerhouse she would eventually become, she sketched out a new kind of woman who was long about her coming, as she phrased it, but drawing nearer all the time:

Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge

breasted and glancing through the currents,

taking the light upon her

at least as beautiful as any boy

or helicopter,

poised, still coming,

her fine blades making the air wince

but her cargo

no promise then:

delivered

palpable

ours.

It was almost as if these lines were composed in retrospect, so sure was Rich of her eventual transfiguration. But she was right about being long about her coming. Eight years passed before she limned the changes she was undergoing, in a poem called Planetarium. Through the isolate figure of Carolyn Herschel, the rare woman in the male world of astronomy, Rich remained at a remove from her true subject. But in the closing lines, she speaks for herself:

I have been standing all my life in the

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most

untranslateable language in the universe

I am a galactic cloud so deepso

involuted that a light wave could take

15 years to travel through meAnd has

takenI am an instrument in the shape

of a woman trying to translate pulsations

into imagesfor the relief of the body

and the reconstruction of the mind.

This was Adrienne Rich in 1968: an instrument poised to change her life and many minds, including her own.

At the peak of her fame, in 1978, on the first page of