Adrienne Rich, a self professed lesbian, Jewish – American, feminist, mother, and poet has added to her repertoire of adjectives and accolades by becoming a socio-political critic in the period of the later nineties and into the new millennium. Within her newest works Rich has shown a new focus and stile within her craft, and an interesting yet alarmingly accurate depiction of the present contextual state of world affairs, regarding socio-political criticism within her poetry. It is this new drive to show the reader the dangers and pitfalls of the socio-political machine that fuel this new style of poetics that give Rich a newness and vitality that is compelling, yet questions the very nature of the vicissitudes of life.
During the first part of Adrienne Rich’s career as a poet, Rich wrote in the accepted style that was established by the predominance of the white male in the literary field. To establish her credibility, and in hopes of being read by her peers, Rich had to conform to these pre-establishmentarian rules and write as if she were a male. She wrote using such pronouns as “you” and “they”, hiding her identity as a female. After becoming further established in the literary and feminist realm, Rich started to write from the perspective of “I”. This was a markedly important shift in her work as she started to openly identify herself as a lesbian and continued to openly struggle on the page with her identity of a being a half Jew in post World War II America. The latest shift that Rich took is one where she has now become comfortable with who she is and what she is; at peace within her inner being. Rich now turns to look at the politics that are shaping society and policy around her; limiting, constraining, unchanging, and hegemonic in nature. This new poetics has a different tonality and resonance for the reader coming to Rich and creates for her a new identity as a critical poet.
Since the 1990’s Rich’s poetry has begun to deal with what is happening all around her in the socio-political realms of the American society in which she lives. Her poetry has an assertive, yet nebulous quality about it that is very much reflective about the ideals that have come out of the political and capitalist realm within this time period. Comfortable with herself and who she is and what she stands for, Rich now can comment on these binding ideologies around her using herself has a counter weight in which to question how these things come into existence. These ideas are presented in an ambiguous manner, almost nebulous in nature, where the reader has to decipher the coded message that she is transmitting. This style of writing is contradictory to earlier statements she made that poetics should be clear and not left to the interpretation of the reader so the message sent is the message received. However, by looking at this period in Rich’s work, a parallel can be made to the work done in the publication entitled Constellations within her craft which, used like a telescope, makes a lot of the ideas she frames come into focus.
Constellations is a publication written by a team of professionals with the following scope and aims: “More than a decade after the end of the Cold War, we face a new set of political contradictions: an historic wave of democratization is accompanied by a surge of uncontrolled economic globalization that threatens the democratic project; expanded possibilities of wealth coexist with new forms exclusion and impoverishments; new information technologies enable a global communications community, yet science and technology are co-opted for sectarian and destructive purposes; and nascent cosmopolitan solidarities coexist with the preemptive unilateralism of a solitary superpower and surge of chauvinisms of every stripe” (Constellations). It is in this context that Constellations rethinks these long standing ideologies and methods, much in the same light that Rich does in the form of poetry.
By close examination of Rich’s works in the most recent time period, it is evident that there are definite questions about the socio-political implications and mandates placed on society at large. Rather than nonchalantly dismissing the current condition to the vicissitudes of life, Rich addresses these issues head on with aplomb and assuredness. Even the language used by capitalism and politics create a system of hegemony in which the government can create a commodity of the citizens in which it is their rights they are to uphold. It is this same system and these same rights in which Rich addresses within her craft. One such example is within her work “Alternating Current” where the fifth section, “A deluxe blending machine”, is commentary about the government’s ability to bend, or rather, blend the truth. It is a commentary about the political right, the power and strange extravagances of the wealthy, and the fight of environmentalists that can not win against a politico-capitalistic system that insists that if there is “A breakdown of the blending machine” then there is “A rush to put it in order” (Rich 69). It is this notion of being in the right that allows a far reaching law and political order to change the world as put by Hauke Brunkhorst within “The Right to War: Hegemonial Geopolitics or Civic Constitutionalism?” in which he states:
A dramatic transformation in the international law and human rights policies of the United States now seems to be taking place, from the national-interest Real- politik that marked most of its foreign policy during the postwar period up to 1989 to an ethically-inspired world domestic policy. True, the two opinions still exist side by side in the present policies of the Bush administration. Pragmatic imperial power politics remains the fall back option of a globally encompassing, apocalyptically-charged interventionism of liberalism, human rights, and democratization. Beyond this, the constraints of international law and multilateral agreements on the only global superpower are much stronger in the economic than in the political realm. But this does nothing to change the fact that the trend to replacing the formal constraints of international law whenever they contradict not only US power-political or economic interests but also moral-ethical goals has been clearly discernible since the Kosovo War at the latest. (Brunkhorst 512)
The afore mentioned example clearly demonstrates the need for the US political system to put ‘the machine in order’ as Rich expresses it, and also shows how far reaching this problem is – to the point of creating a global ideology through ethnical-political dominance.
Another recent work in which she criticizes the political and social system is “Veteran’s Day”. In this work Rich criticizes the effects of war and destruction caused by our government and the history of such destruction and atrocity that is swept under the rugs of wealth and political power. She criticizes the right to change anything that we [America] want to, to make anything a commodity by selling something as basic as water and making it chic to selling the world on our form of democracy and ethics. In the article “Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight” by Fuyuki Kursasawa, there is a similar message of the right to change, albeit not all for the better, to the point of being in the state of constantly being in the “culture of prevention”, to keep events like 9/11 from happening again. This is a state of alertness on a global level, a daily test of what is to come, which is similar to Rich’s work in “Veteran’s Day” in the last half of stanza three where she writes:
I think: We’ve been dying slowly
Now we’ll be blown to bits
I think you’re testing me
“how vitally we desired disaster”
You say, there can be no poetry
without the demolition
of language, no end to everything you hate
lies upon lies
I think: you’re testing me
Testing us both
but isn’t this what it means to live –
pushing further the conditions in which we breathe? (Fox 298)
In comparison to the ideas presented in Kurasawa’s work, there are striking similarities of thought and criticism in which Kurasawa states:
In the twenty-first century, the lines of political cleavage are being drawn along those of competing dystopian visions. Indeed, one of the notable features of the recent public discourse and the socio-political struggle is their negationist hue, for they are devoted as much to the prevention of disaster as to the realization of the good, less to what ought to be than what could but must not be. The debates that preceded the war in Iraq provide a vivid illustration of this tendency, as both camps rhetorically invoked incommensurable catastrophic scenarios to make their perspective cases. And as many analysts have noted, the multinational anti-war protests culminating on February 15, 2003 marked the first time that a mass movement was able to mobilize substantial numbers of people dedicated to averting war before it had actually broken out. More generally, given the past experiences and awareness of what might occur in the future, given the cries of ‘never again’ (the Second World War, the Holocaust, Bhopal, Rwanda, etc.) and ‘not ever’ (e.g., nuclear or ecological apocalypse, human cloning) that are emanating from different parts of the world, the avoidance of crises is seemingly on everyone’s lips – and everyone’s conscience. From the United Nations and regional multilateral organizations to states, from non-governmental organizations to transnational social movements, the determination to prevent the actualization of potential cataclysms has become a new imperative in world affairs. Allowing past disasters to reoccur and unprecedented calamities to unfold is now widely seen as unbearable when, in the process, the suffering of future generations is callously tolerated and our survival is being irresponsibly jeopardized. Hence, we need to pay attention to what a widely circulated report by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty identifies as a burgeoning “culture of prevention,” a dynamic that carries major, albeit still poorly understood, normative and political implications. (Kurasawa 454)
It is the same political implications in which Kurasawa brings up that Rich is addressing within her work when she questions “the conditions in which we breathe”. It is such political, social, and economic dangers of preventive foresight that has the capacity of blinding us from the reality of today. Through Rich’s exploratory poems of the conditions or state of the union, she brings to light a history of wrongs that need to be addressed in the context of the problems that exist today.
Rich’s dynamic for questioning that which is pressuring and moving the socio-political constructs in the American society have made her a critical poet in this new millennium. Poems such as the two previously quoted, “Alternating Current” and “Veteran’s Day” along with many others within her newest collection, such as “This Evening Let’s,” “If Your Name Is on the List,” and “The School Among the Ruins” along with many more, capture the histories of the socio-political past and collide them the present day context of the ‘culture of prevention’ to create powerful writing that is contemporary and contextual. Rich’s work has a new depth and meaning to it that does not subtract from her earlier work, but shows a sense of growth and personal transformation that helps the reader engage her works on multiple levels and yet question the current state of affairs through her most recent works.
Works Cited
Brunkhorst, Hauke. “The Right to War: Hegemonial Geopolitics or Civic Constitutionalism?” Constellations Vol. 11, No. 4 (2004): 512-26.Kurasawa, Fuyuki. “Cautionary Tales: The Global Culture of Prevention and the Work of Foresight.” Constellations Vol.11, No.4 (2004): 453-75.
Rich, Adrienne. The Fact of a Doorframe. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.
Rich, Adrienne. The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004.
