Collected Poems Adrienne Rich

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.Anyone familiar with my work from the early sixties on knows that I believe in art’s social presence—as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright.In my lifetime I have seen the space for the arts opened by movements for social justice, the power of art to break despair.Over the past two decades I have witnessed the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice in our country.There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice.But I do know that art—in my own case the art of poetry—means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.Positioned as a teacher, as I often am now, at the front of a classroom, I was struck by reading a line in “Draft #2006” from Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth.The line—“Maybe I couldn’t write fast enough.Maybe it was too soon.”—reminded me that this urgency, apprehension, and questioning has characterized all of Rich’s poems.Still it seems she responds in time, as she will always be once and future, and her work always relevant.They asked me, is this time worse than another.I said for whom?Wanted to show them something.While I wrote on thechalkboard they drifted out.I turned back to an empty room.Maybe I couldn’t write fast enough.Maybe it was too soon.In her Collected Poems 1950—2012 we have a chronicle of over a half century of what it means to risk the self in order to give the self, to refer back to Baldwin.As the poet Marilyn Hacker as written,Rich’s body of work establishes, among other things, an intellectual autobiography, which is interesting not as the narrative of one life (which it’s not) and still less as intimate divulgence, but as the evolution and revolutions of an exceptional mind, with all its curiosity, outreaching, exasperation and even its errors.One of our best minds writes her way through the changes that have brought us here, in all the places that continue to entangle our liberties in the twenty-first century.And here is not “somewhere else but here,” Rich writes.We remain in “our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, / its own way of making people disappear.”What Kind of Times Are TheseThere’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphilland the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadowsnear a meeting-house abandoned by the persecutedwho disappeared into those shadows.I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooledthis isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,its own ways of making people disappear.I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woodsmeeting the unmarked strip of light—ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell youanything? Because you still listen, because in times like theseto have you listen at all, it’s necessaryto talk about trees.EDITOR’S NOTEThis is the first collection of Adrienne Rich’s poetry to be published without her active involvement.However, in certain ways it is based on similar collected works that she edited at intervals over the course of her career.She undertook the last of these in the year leading up to her death in 2012—going through all the work she’d published since The Will to Change in 1971 and adding ten new poems to create Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012.Rich had already gone through this process several times during the previous fifty years: looking through the books of poetry she had published up to that point to choose representative work for a volume of “selected” poems.In 1975, just a year after her pivotal book Diving into the Wreck, W.W.Norton published the first such volume, Poems: Selected and New, 1950–1974.Nearly ten years later, in 1984, she repeated the process with The Fact of a Doorframe, followed in 1993 by Collected Early Poems 1950–1970, which consists of the full text of her first six books.In each case, along with selections from earlier books, she chose what she called “uncollected” work: poems that she had previously held back or had only published in magazines but never included in a book.She also added new work; important poems like “The Fact of a Doorframe” and “From an Old House in America” first appeared in Poems: Selected and New.In the foreword to that book, she described her selection as “the graph of a process still going on,” a statement equally true of The Fact of a Doorframe when it was first published in 1984 and also when she updated it for W.W.Norton more than fifteen years later.Those books are the basis for the present collection, except that now nothing has been omitted: all of Rich’s published poetry appears here in one volume, including all of the uncollected poems.Explanatory notes that she provided for some of her poems are compiled and appear here in a single section at the back.There were a few instances where she changed words or lines in an earlier poem when preparing to include it in one of the “selected” books.These alterations were described in her notes, and this collection preserves the later versions.Except for Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012, she also wrote short forewords for each of the “selected” volumes, describing how she made her selections and offering an account of her experience as the person who wrote those poems and of the world in which she found herself at work.The forewords are often self-critical, and they emphasize her place in a wider current of language, poetry, and events.These short essays aren’t included in the present book, but some information from them, specific to individual poems, is incorporated into the endnotes of the present collection.In omitting any appendix of drafts or discarded poems, this volume respects Rich’s own directions regarding the papers she donated to Radcliffe’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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