Where Poetry and Truth Align

On a raw spring evening in late March of 1977, at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women in Westchester County, just outside of New York City, I listened to Adrienne Rich address a roomful of women who had challenged the law in a variety of ways. I had invited her to participate in a lecture series that took place inside prison walls, sponsored by a program I directed called “Art Without Walls.” Rich was talking to the inmates about a chapter from her new book, “Of Woman Born,” entitled “Violence: The Heart of Maternal Darkness.” She was talking about women who beat or killed their own children to an audience that contained a few women who had done one or the other or both. She was not condoning such violence but investigating its sources, shattering a taboo, moving to the heart of a discourse that, in America’s Cult of the Perfect Mother, had not often been heard. I had come to understand, over a period of a few years, that inmates did not willingly or easily discuss their “situations,” the reasons for their incarceration. I had therefore looked forward to this visit with some uncertainty.

It occurred to me on that evening, as woman after woman rose to contribute to the discussion, at first hesitantly, then with increasing urgency, that I shouldn’t have worried, that Rich is a poet for whom the idea of the inexpressible is not even a dismissible romantic yearning. For Adrienne Rich, there is no such thing as the inexpressible.

The recent publication of “Midnight Salvage” furthers this premise; in fact, it offers the reader a chorus of voices, persona of the expressed life, from the French poet Rene Char to Karl Marx to photographer Tina Modotti to a talking head. Just as Rich has remade her expressible self with each book, here language seems caught in the act of apperception, startling itself into new combinations.

Broken by force, broken by lying

green, with the flare of life in it.

--THE ART OF TRANSLATION

This is not entirely new territory for a poet who has rummaged through the basement of the epistemological to drag new ideas upstairs into the light of poetic contemplation. From her beginnings as a polite ingenue formalist Yale Younger Poet, through her dramatic transformations into radical feminist, lesbian separatist, architect of a new revisionist poetics, late recoverer of Jewish roots, Whitman-esque chronicler of the dying Republic and finally--in “Midnight Salvage,” what she most unerringly is--reconstructed Metaphysical, author of a pure, resilient lyric, recombinant as a bead of mercury--her compass has remained set due north, where poetry and truth are aligned.

This places Rich in a tradition that includes the great Russian Modernist poet Anna Ahkmatova, who, when asked while standing in a line of mothers outside the gates of a Leningrad prison in Stalinist Russia if she could express the horror, the hopelessness of the moment, replied, “I can.”

It places Rich in that tradition--but here in 1999, in an ostensibly rich and free country, whose media mostly ignore prisons and prison lines and whose interest in the lives of poets is right up there with its interest in clog dancing. How then does a major poet of conscience speak out in a country where Power isn’t listening and political oppression is almost always reduced to banality? In “Midnight Salvage,” she confronts this dilemma.

Her belief that all things human, no matter how monstrous, wondrous, alien or trivialized, are sayable combines here with her belief in the poet’s responsibility to speak, to discover the words to challenge the silence of the prison line, the mindless insidious voices of consumer culture and media. That many poets resist this call, resist her vision, remains one of the ironies of her position as a contemporary Shelley. This too, she puts on the page.

All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not . . .

--A LONG CONVERSATION

And after giving the reader a heady dose of the language of political analysis:

now someone gets up and leaves, cloud-faced: -- I can’t stand that

kind of language. I still care about poetry.

--A LONG CONVERSATION

Faced with, on one hand, the dubious response of poets who suspect the categorical as a betrayal of poetry’s mystery and autonomy and, on the other, with her nightmare vision of a bar code stamped on the soul, Rich takes no prisoners:

But neither was expecting in my time

to witness this: . . .

to see

a not O my Captain

fallen cold and dead by the assassin’s hand

but cold alive & cringing: drinking with the assassins

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

--MIDNIGHT SALVAGE

What poet, in recent memory, has taken on nerve gas traffickers and executive compromise via Whitman?

Her judgment of the “cloud-faced” poet who walks away from the political discussion surfaces slyly in the voice of one of her “characters,” the poet Rene Char, a onetime Surrealist who became a commander in the French Resistance in World War II. Char, in his journal, notes that he has become a “realist,” putting distance between himself and Andre Breton, who once said that “the simplest surreal act” involved walking down the street shooting randomly with a revolver. Char, as Rich recounts, now realizes such swagger would do nothing “to change the balance of power” and, further, that “real acts are not simple.” Rich, quoting Char, lets the whip snap one more time in the direction of the “cloud-faced” contingent:

The poet, prone to exaggerate, thinks clearly under torture . . .

--CHAR

Just so her appropriation of the Rilke title, “Letters to a Young Poet.” Rilke counsels the young poet in his correspondence “to live the questions,” bearing out his faith in the unseen and unsaid.

. . . most events are inexpressible, taking place in a realm which no word has ever entered, and more inexpressible than all else are works of art. . . .

--RAINER MARIA RILKE, “LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET”

Rich’s “Letters to a Young Poet” are a strikingly different example of correspondence, written in a strikingly different time than Rilke’s, as evidenced by her recurring use of the word “ineluctable” in addressing the young poet, in dramatic contrast to Rilke’s “inexpressible.” This deadly sense of inevitability weighs the poem down. Then too there is the poem’s style: its short blip-like bursts of insinuation and an aura that ranges from solicitous to menacing and morgue-like:

--I will not touch you further:

our choice to freeze or not

to say, you and I are caught in

a laboratory without a science

--LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

Though Rich is highlighting the difference in the collective psyche of our time versus Rilke’s--and the interruption of a natural order--I feel that, of the poem sequences, this one is least successful in its jerky pronouncements, its single-minded omniscience:

It’s not the deja vu that kills

it’s the foreseeing

the head that speaks from the crater.

--LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET

But another letter poem, “Camino Real,” manages to lift the epistolary (after a scattershot beginning) to fulsome heights, revealing Rich’s lyric gifts and a surprising abandon, an emotional distraction:

let it not be exonerated

but O the light

on the raw Pacific silks

Charles Olson: can you afford not to make

the magical study

which happiness is?

--CAMINO REAL

We have not heard Adrienne Rich mention “happiness” often in her work, its sighting here, as she drives down the California coast, signals (it seems to me) a tentative exploration of the ecstatic. In order to embark on this “magical study,” she has attempted to release herself from authorial preemptions. (Notice her relinquishing that primacy in the quote above as she moves with a kind of “projected” breath shift from line to line, from harsh judgment to rapture, in the manner of “projectivist” poet Charles Olson, whom she invokes here.)

To read some of the poems as they are written, we must move out of the realm of the “I” and see that she has positioned herself as a kind of “receiver,” both passive and engaged, as a subway rider overhearing fellow passengers.

In the charged, cabaret-like sequence, “A Long Conversation,” she moves from the pure anarchic delight of a child’s ballgame to Mandelstam’s musing, to Marx in the classroom, to a Brechtian bartender, to Coleridge writing to Wordsworth in despair after the French Revolution, to Nixon (“ . . . the Arts, you know--they’re Jews, they’re left wing, in other words, stay away. . . .”), back to the self looking at language, its landscape, through a train window.

In this whiplash, dizzying soul’s progress, she gives us back our own time, our style of discourse, our symbols. The “foreseeing head” in “Letters to a Young Poet” recurs as the “Shattered Head” that has been violently separated from the body in some terrible atrocity and speaks now to mass indifference. One senses as well that Rich has felt like this disembodied head (“it’s the foreseeing. . . .”) at times in the course of her career when she has been accused of intellectual distance from her subjects or coldness of tone. More than anything else, this is a book that struggles to have--no matter how shattered or broken--a body.

Perhaps the most arresting poem in this search for embodiment is “The Art of Translation,” in which language itself is given flesh and Rich touches its transactive power.

Like a thief I would deny the words, deny even they

existed, were spoken, or could be spoken

like a thief I’d bury them and remember where.

--THE ART OF TRANSLATION

Her engine of anaphora, her risky hurtling line, her broken syntax all signal a mind caught up in what might seem showy risk-taking in another poet. For Rich, this is the midnight salvage, the late-in-life release into summative, alternative beauty: invoked passion, erotic presence, Ithacas of pain and resolution--rescued.

Like Whitman, she is swept into the irresistible anarchy of empathy. Thus Hart Crane is resurrected here, and Miles Davis, Muriel Rukeyser (at the old New York City Westbeth artists co-op) and Julia de Burgos. “Thirty years,” she cries in the title poem, “in love and pleasure and grief-blind.” “I will submit,” she adds in the same poem, “to whatever poetry is / I accept no limits.”

Out of her pen comes a drag queen’s voice as well as the voice of a young coed dating a brilliant paraplegic Harvard student (“ What a girl I was then with a body / ready for breaking open”), recounting their imagined sexual encounter as again, the severed spine, like the severed head, shimmers into the many improvised limbs of desire.

. . . in what insurrectionary

convulsion would we have done it mouth to mouth

mouth-tongue to vulva-tongue to anus earlobe to nipple

--SEVEN SKINS

“Midnight Salvage” reinforces its epigraph from George Oppen, “ . . . the issue is happiness / There is no other issue,” even as he laments that happiness cannot be measured. Rich is exploring the possibility of happiness, measure by measure. It’s a hard-won, fierce-faced joy to be sure, lit by the banked fires of prisoners, exiled poets--but it is, in Adrienne Rich’s unbowed, ineluctable terms, humanly embodied and eminently, brilliantly expressible.