Rebecca Stoner Reads Adrienne Rich at Pacific Standard

At Pacific Standard, a new compendium of Adrienne Rich's writings, Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry (W.W. Norton), serves as the impetus for a look back at Rich's career and ahead to feminism's future. Rebecca Stoner first situates the collection within her own experience, "When I first read the poet and essayist Adrienne Rich, I was 21, a student at an all-women's summer program on a farm in Sonoma, California," before aligning Rich's work with feminism's most relevant struggles today. "Revisiting Rich, I found this same uncompromising drive toward truth, but also a more complex and rigorous politics than I'd remembered; an excellent guide to living for anyone invested in the feminist struggle today, or the struggle for self-determination and equality more broadly." Let's pick up there: 

I learned most from Rich's reinvention of her life and thought, her engagement with a process of self-interrogation and self-fashioning that "in our lifetimes, [has] no end," she writes.

Rich was born in Baltimore in 1929 to a genteel, Southern mother who set aside her own talents and ambitions to raise her children, and a determinedly assimilated Jewish father who instructed her in the art of poetry as it had been practiced by dead white men. As a young woman, she felt intense dissonance between her desire for an artistic, intellectual life and the life she was expected to have. "From the age of 13 or 14, I had felt I was only acting the part of a feminine creature," she writes. "The lipstick and high heels of the era were difficult-to-manage disguises." Her ambitions were to write poetry and explore post-war Europe as a journalist. But she found herself spending hours "trying to apply lipstick more adroitly, straightening the wandering seams of stockings, talking about 'boys.'"

Precocious and technically gifted, she published her first book of poetry, A Change of World, at age 22. It won the Yale Younger Poets Prize along with patronizing praise from W.H. Auden: "The poems a reader will encounter in this book are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs." At first, Rich followed the traditional path of "woman's great adventure, duty, and fulfillment," and was married with three children by the age of 30.

Read more at Pacific Standard.