Wayne Koestenbaum Hears the Ethics in Adrienne Rich's Collected Poems

Wayne Koestenbaum reviews Adrienne Rich's Collected Poems (Norton, June) for the New York Times. "Poetry’s system of cultivated sounds was, she grew to feel, a patriarchal racket," he writes. "Her career staged a revolt against tamed sound. Of this conflict — the attempt to reconcile music and ethics — she founded a perpetually astonishing body of work, filled with battle cries, conversion scenes and illuminating flashes."

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Rich’s poems, staged within her investigating mind’s planetarium, bundle together imagistic enigmas, and then pierce the fog with plain-spoken moments of reckoning, her syllables paced, lucent, stentorian: “But there come times — perhaps this is one of them — / when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die.” The unconscious didn’t seem to play much part in her work; instead, she chose daylight. To change the world, a poem needs to state its points with blistering simplicity. See the heartbreaking end of “A Woman Dead in Her Forties”: “the body tells the truth in its rush of cells / . . . I would have touched my fingers / to where your breasts had been / but we never did such things.” This avowal may be intimate, but she pitches her voice to echo in the amphitheater. No gesture, in her carefully wrought poems, ever seemed accidental; and yet, starting in the mid-1950s, she dated each poem, to mark it as a revocable way station.

Rich performed her ethical mission by writing lines sensitive to the pulsations and textures of material fact: animal, plant, human, stone, water, planet. Her politics, not abstract, took place in blood vessels. Precarious ecologies stirred her sympathies. Rich was a natural historian with an ear for the music that politics makes in the body. Listen to her long vowels and keen consonants; listen to the leitmotif of pain. Note the physiologies of words like “crevice” and “gobbets,” “shearing” and “vetch,” “scours” and “debridements,” “pelt” and “cumbrous,” “juts” and “bleak glare aching,” “rootsuck” and “glare-lit,” “crenellated” and “burdock,” “pleated” and “mazed,” “grief-tranced hand” and “the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch.” Rich concentrated her music; necessary, dubious, it incarnated her earliest hopes.

Listening to Rich’s vowels and consonants, we hear her ethics. Racism and patriarchy have pillaged a natural world she elegizes; amid mourning, she intones (in a voice disbursing consolation) such lancing phrases as “the lake’s light-blistered blue,” “the soaked wick quietly / drinking,” “striated iris stand in a jar.” Nor forget “crimson stems veining upward” or “the dry darkbrown lace of seaweed.” Observe the “bridgelit shawls” and the “sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air.” Pay homage to “firegreen yucca under fire-ribbed clouds / blue-green agave grown huge in flower” and the spectacle of “bloodred bract from spiked stem / tossing on the ocean.” Learn from a rainbow “arching her lusters over rut and stubble.”

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