Her new volume Mid-night Salvage shows veteran American poet Adrienne Rich still preoccupied with politics and the political function of poetry. Rich is a veteran of American literary life in more ways than one. Born in 1929 into an upper-middle-class Baltimore household, her precocious talent received crucial early encouragement from her father.
Recognition for her work came quickly: while she was still a student at Radcliffe College her first collection A Change of World was chosen by W.H. Auden for the prestigious Yale Younger Poets award. Auden's citation, now notorious for its tone of patriarchal condescension, remarks that Rich's poems were "neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them and do not tell fibs". But fatherly approval was something Rich was practised in achieving: "for about 20 years I wrote for a particular man [her father], who criticised and praised me and made me feel I was indeed "special". The obverse side of this, of course, was that I tried for a long time to please him, or rather, not to displease him."
Rich's trajectory as a writer was away from the politeness of her youthful poetry and the conventionality of her early life (she married and had three children before the age of 30) towards lesbianism, feminism, and political activism. Even in the earliest poetry there is a troubled concern with questions of mastery. Poems like "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" and "Storm Warnings" from A Change of World now clarify the fundamental continuity of Rich's subject matter.
Although at the age of 21 her poetry was apolitical, by the end of the 1960s Rich had transformed her point of view sufficiently to be able to write: "The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political." The conventions of rhyme, metre, and the appropriate image had been dispensed with, and Rich was attempting to unify her personal, political and aesthetic lives.
Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998 shows Rich (approaching her 70th birthday) as concerned with the old questions as ever. As might be expected, there is a retrospective flavour to this work, but no lack of urgency. In the title poem Rich muses on her own earlier idealism: "Had never expected hope would form itself/ completely in my time : was never so sanguine/ as to believe old injuries could transmute easily/ through any singular event or idea . . ." The oppressor here is less "Man" in general than the Leviathan of late 20th-century American capitalism, and the arms industry in particular:
pushing his daughter in her famine
waisted flamingo gown
out on the dance floor with the traffickers
in nerve gas saying to them Go for it
and to the girl Get with it
One might question the value of this as poetry, but to do so would be to miss a fundamental point. While at its weakest Rich's work is self-righteous and resembles chopped-up polemical prose, at its best her free verse has an intelligence and a rhetorical vigour that conveys her meaning more effectively than prose ever could. It is probable that in the hands of any other poet such material would seem a kind of ego-fuelled sermonising, but Rich's poems have always read like genuine dispatches from the front line of political disaffection and agitation. It is this lived-in conviction that gives the work its integrity as a whole, making Mid-night Salvage worth reading as a late stage in Adrienne Rich's remarkable personal, political and poetic experiment.
Caitriona O'Reilly is a poet and critic