Adrienne Rich, American Skeptic

ADRIENNE RICH, AMERICAN SKEPTIC

Adrienne Rich has been recognized as one of the most influential poets in the U.S. the past several decades. She passed away in 2012. 

She came of age as a political activist during the turbulent counter-culture of the sixties. Her activism coincided with the rise in the U.S. of second wave feminism and the beginning of the modern gay liberation movement. The latter is usually dated to the Stonewall riots on June 28, 1969.

Poet and essayist, Rich is a very influential, articulate, and sophisticated literary voice advancing two major contemporary liberation movements, feminism and LGBT rights, or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights. Her beacon, multi-awarded track record is documented, for example, in Poetry magazine:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/adrienne-rich

Feminism and LGBT rights are each loci of complexly related issues with worldwide reach. They are international liberation movements centered in the U.S. and Western Europe mainly. Although Rich is known and celebrated in the U.S. primarily, as a contemporary leader of feminism and LGBT rights, her influence is global.

As a prominent feminist, Rich’s global influence is a given. After all, the varieties of contemporary feminism are a direct concern of a little less than half the world population.

As an advocate for LGBT rights, her influence is also substantial because the LGBT population worldwide is considerable. The cat is out of the closet, so to speak. Today, entire societies cannot but be majorly occupied with issues related to the treatment—legal, political, social, and economic—of this salient minority group.

One of the largest minority groups in any country is that of the LGBT population. It is difficult to estimate the actual count because as a rule acknowledging your LGBT identity, whether in surveys or elsewhere, is taboo. Besides, homosexual activity is illegal in 73 countries.

Still, we can go by the results of scientific and professional surveys. In 2017 a Gallup survey found that 4.5% of the total U.S. population or over 11 million Americans self-identified as LGBT. If the proportion of the total world population that self-identifies as LGBT is in this vicinity—a reasonable suggestion—then we can conclude that out of a total world population of 7.5 billion in 2017, up to 337.5 million people would probably self-identify as LGBT. The proportion may be small, but the number is considerable.

See:

—“This is the state of LGBTI rights around the world in 2018,” World Economic Forum (June 14, 2018) by Rosamond Hutt

https://news.gallup.com/poll/234863/estimate-lgbt-population-rises.aspx

—“In U.S., Estimate of LGBT Population Rises to 4.5%,” Gallup (May 22, 2018) by Frank Newport

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/lgbti-rights-around-the-world-in-2018/

Towards the end of her life, Rich described herself as an “American Skeptic.” The moniker is appropriate for someone, keenly intelligent, who sought to deconstruct the social structures that constrain the advancement of her two lifetime occupations, feminism and LGBT rights. Deconstruction is the province of the intellectual skeptic.

“I began as an American optimist, albeit a critical one, formed by our racial legacy and by the Vietnam War…I became an American Skeptic, not as to the long search for justice and dignity, which is part of all human history, but in the light of my nation's leading role in demoralizing and destabilizing that search, here at home and around the world. Perhaps just such a passionate skepticism, neither cynical nor nihilistic, is the ground for continuing.”

—Adrienne Rich, Los Angeles Times (March 11, 2001)

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/adrienne-rich

The above quote shows that Rich was critical of the reactionary exercise of global U.S. power and influence.

“Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” appeared in Adrienne Rich’s first book of poetry, A Change of World (1951), published when she was only 22 years old. The collection of 40 poems won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.

AUNT JENNIFER’S TIGERS

Aunt Jennifer’s tigers prance across a screen,

Bright topaz denizens of a world of green.

They do not fear the men beneath the tree;

They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

Aunt Jennifer’s finger fluttering through her wool

Find even the ivory needle hard to pull.

The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band

Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie

Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.

The tigers in the panel that she made

Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

The poem deals with the motif of feminism, which Rich would maintain in her poetry throughout her life.

The poem is understated, straightforward, and not especially difficult. Once the reader realizes that the “tigers” are embroidered designs in a woolen field, the overt meaning of the poem is readily apparent. The “massive weight” of Aunt Jennifer’s “wedding band” is a giveaway indicating that Aunt Jennifer’s marriage, and by extension the institution of marriage, is a type of social oppression. The poem describes her hands at death as still bound, “ringed” with “ordeals” and frozen in terror. They are the same hands that created the tigers that prance freely, “proud and unafraid” of the “men beneath the tree.” Manifestly, the tigers symbolize freedom from the oppression of patriarchy.

Published in 1957, “A Ball Is for Throwing” is occupied with feminist and gay liberation motifs. Key to its interpretation is getting a fix on what the ball stands for.

A BALL IS FOR THROWING

See it, the beautiful ball

Poised in the toyshop window,

Rounder than sun or moon.

Is it red? is it blue? is it violet?

It is everything we desire,

And it does not exist at all.

Non-existent and beautiful? Quite.

In the rounding leap of our hands,

In the longing hush of air,

We know what that ball could be,

How its blues and reds could spin

To a headier violet.

Beautiful in the mind,

Like a word we are waiting to hear,

That ball is construed, but lives

Only in flash of flight,

From the instant of release

To the catch in another’s hand.

And the toy withheld is a token

Of all who refrain from play—

The shopkeepers, the collectors

Like Queen Victoria,

In whose adorable doll’s house

Nothing was ever broken.

—“A Ball Is for Throwing,” Poetry (August 1957) by Adrienne Rich

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=27402

The poem cites two toys: the ball and the doll’s house. The latter, a girl’s toy, is for those who, like shopkeepers and Queen Victoria, “refrain from play,” and the ball is “the toy withheld” from them. In the last stanza it is apparent that the ball is a boy’s toy, so that it is a symbol of masculine identity, just as the doll’s house is a symbol of feminine identity.

Significantly, the ball is spoken of in positive, liberating terms. It represents many possibilities—it can spin its blues and reds into violet, it is “beautiful in the mind” when it is thrown, “it is everything we desire.”

Symbolically, the poem protests the assignment of sex-typed roles to males and females. By extension, it also critiques the male-female dichotomy qua social institution that is the basis for sex-typing.

“What Kind of Times Are These” is a protest poem, understated and allusive. At the time of publication in 1995 Rich was in her mid-sixties.

WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill

and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows

near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted

who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled

this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods

meeting the unmarked strip of light—

ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:

I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you

anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these

to have you listen at all, it’s necessary

to talk about trees.

This poem was originally published in Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems, 1991-1995 (1995).

See: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51092/what-kind-of-times-are-these

The poem is about a place, and when we examine this place closely, it is marked by disquiet and in some way cursed and threatened. It is “near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared,” which suggests a political context. “Our country,” the speaker says, is moving in the direction of “truth and dread,” and because the speaker alludes to Russia, a country where people are made to disappear, the meaning of this statement is political. As people have been made to disappear, the speaker continues, the place risks the same fate. The poem is political but in an unassuming sort of way.

Why speak about this place, “about trees”? Because “to talk about trees” primes the audience to listen, and since the import of the poem is political, that about which the poem acts as a preparation is therefore of political significance—“because in times like these / to have you listen at all, it’s necessary / to talk about trees.”

Rich alludes to Bertolt Brecht’s “An die Nachgeborenen” or “To Those Who Follow in Our Wake,” published in 1939. Excerpt from the first stanza:

Wirklich, ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten!...

Was sind das für Zeiten, wo

Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist

Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt!

This poem was originally published in Svendborger Gedichte (1939).

English translation:

Truly, I live in dark times!...

What times are these, in which

A conversation about trees is almost a crime

For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!

Translation was originally published in Gesammelte Werke, Volume 4, (1967), S.H. transl.

See: https://harpers.org/blog/2008/01/brecht-to-those-who-follow-in-our-wake/

Brecht laments that in Nazi Germany, citizens maintain conversations about “trees” because they are constrained to keep silent about Nazi depravity. Their silence is “almost a crime.”

Once we recognize Rich’s allusion to Brecht, it is apparent that her poem is political. The poem protests the unavoidably indirect manner by which difficult issues must be presented to a resistant audience.

Adrienne Rich, undated photo