Writers Speak; Lecture by Adrienne Rich on "Blood, Bread, and Poetry"

Welcome to write or speak. Or speak in a series of seven programs featuring prominent message U.S. writers. The series is a program of the Institute for Advanced Study in the humanities at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This program features Adrienne Rich. Feminist poet and social critic. The moderator is writer Julius Lester. Historically writers have never agreed on what their social responsibility might be of any this series gives seven writers and the general public the opportunity to exchange and share ideas and feelings about the social responsibility of the writer to help facilitate such

a dialogue between writers and the public. Each writer has been asked to build her or his presentation around a series of questions and some of these questions were. Should the writer create for public that is be responsible to the public. Are is the writer's sole responsibility to be true to his or her art and worldview. Who do you write for. Why do you write. Do the demands or writing of the writers special privilege or status. Who is your public place your writing and a socio cultural context. Tonight speaker is adding and rich unable Baltimore Maryland Mr. Rich is a graduate of Radcliffe and in her senior year. Wonder Gayle Young reports award on publication of her first book a change of world. She has been awarded Guggenheim fellowships on two occasions as well as grants from the American Institute of Arts and Letters and a bob engine Foundation grant

for translation in 1976. Her book diving into the wreck was called went to the National Book Award along with books about Audrey Lord and Alice Walker. The three women refused the award as individuals and accepted it on behalf of all women including those whose voices have been suppressed. The author of 11 books of poems is rich is also written two nonfiction works. A woman born motherhood has experience an institution and on lies secrets and silence. And she is coeditor with Michelle clips of the lesbian feminist Journal sinister wisdom without question. And Richard is one of the best and most important poets of our time and the influence of her work and life on a generation of women has been great. Reading a woman born was for me an important a very important experience. So it is an honor a privilege and a very special pleasure to

welcome Adoree in which I. Am Perhaps perhaps not curious the name I've given to this talk is blood bread and poetry. You'll love Nicaragua. A North American woman said to me at the airport. Everyone there is a poet. I have thought many times of that remark. Well while I was there for a week in July and since returning home coming from the North American white dominated which encourages poets to think of ourselves as alienated from the sensibility of the general population which so casually and devastatingly marginalized us no slave labor camp or a political

poem just dead air the white sound of the media jamming the poet's words. Coming from this North American dominant culture which so confuses us telling us that poetry is not the economically profitable nor politically effective and the political dissidence is destructive to our coming from this culture that tells me I am destined to be a luxury a decorative garnish on the buffet table of the university curriculum the ceremonial occasion the national celebration. What am I to make. I thought of that remark. You love Nicaragua. Everyone there is a poet. Do I love poets in general. I immediately asked myself thinking of poets I neither love nor would wish to see in charge of my country. Is being a poet a qualification for being a revolutionary. Can I just

go as an American radical a lesbian feminist a citizen opposing her government's wars against its own people and those of other lands and of what value can be the testimony of a poet returning from a revolution where everyone is a poet to a country where the possible credibility of poetry is not even seriously discussed. Clearly this well-meant remark triggered strong and complex feelings in me and it provided in a sense the text on which I began to build the talk I'm giving here tonight. I want to begin by giving some poetic and political biography of the woman who is speaking here. The individual writer facing you tonight. I was born at the brink of the Great Depression. I reached 16 the year of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The daughter of a Jewish

father and a Protestant mother I learned about the Holocaust first from newsreel films of the liberation of the death camps. I was a young white woman who had never known hunger or homelessness growing up in the suburbs of a deeply segregated city. I lived 16 years of my life secure in the belief that those cities could be bombed in large civilian populations killed the earth stood in its old indestructible way. The process through which nuclear annihilation was to become a part of all human expectancy had already begun. But we did not live with that knowledge during the first 16 years of my life and a recurrent theme in much poetry I read was the survival of poetry after the poet's death. The poem as a vehicle for personal immortality. I had grown up hearing

and reading poems from a very young age. First a sound repeated musical rhythmically satisfying in themselves the power of concrete sensuously compelling images. There were three jovial Welshmen as I have heard men say and they would go on hunting upon St. David's day all night long they hunted and nothing did they find but a ship a sailing a sailing with the wind. One said it was a ship. The other he said nay the third said it was a house with the chimney blown away and the night they hunted and nothing did they find. But the moon a gliding or gliding with the wind. But poetry soon became more than music and images. It was also revelation information a kind of teaching. I believed I could learn from it. An unusual idea for a United States

citizen. Even a child. I thought it could offer clues intimations keys to questions that already stalked me. Questions I could not even claim yet. What is possible in this life. What does love mean. This thing that is so important. What is this other thing called freedom or liberty. Is it like a feeling. What if human beings lived instructed in the past. How am I going to live my life. The fact that poets contradicted themselves and each other didn't baffle or alarm me. And of course I thought that the poets in the anthologies were the only real poets that they were being in the anthologies was proof of this. Though some are classified as great and others as minor. I owed much to those anthologies from silver pennies to the constant outflow of volumes edited by Louis Untermeyer to Paul graves Golden Treasury and the Oxford Book of

English verse. But I had no idea that they reflected the taste of a particular time or of particular kinds of people. I still believe that poets were inspired by some transcendent authority and spoke from some extraordinary height. But my personal world view at 16 as it 26 was itself being created by political conditions. I was not a man. I wish white in a white supremacist society. I was being educated from the perspective of a particular class. My mother was a white southern Protestant. My brother and assimilated Jew in an anti-Semitic world. There were particular historical currents on which my consciousness would come together piece by piece. My personal worldview was shaped in part by the poetry I had read a poetry written almost entirely by white Anglo-Saxon men

a few women Celts and Frenchmen notwithstanding there was no poetry in the Spanish language or from Africa or China. My personal worldview which like so many young people I carried as a conviction of my own uniqueness was not original with me but was rather my untutored and half conscious rendering of the facts of blood and bread. The social and political forces of my time and place I was in college during the late 1940s and early 50s the 30s a decade of economic desperation social unrest war and also political art was receding behind the fogs of the Cold War the sanctification of the nuclear family with the mother at home as it's core a heightened activity by the FBI and CIA. A retreat by many artists from

so-called protest art which charting among artists and intellectuals as well as in the State Department. Anti-Semitism scapegoating of homosexual men and lesbians and was a symbolic victory for the Cold War crusade in the electrocution in 1953 of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. It was strangely enough through poetry that I first began to try to make sense of these things. Strangely enough I say because of course the reading of poetry in an academic institution is supposed to lead you in the 1980s as back there in the early 50s not toward a criticism of society but toward a professional career in which the anatomy of poems is studied much as the medical professional studies human anatomy. Maybe I was lucky because I had started reading poetry so young and not in school and because I had been writing poems almost as long as I

had been reading them. I should add that I was easily in trance by pure sound and still am. No matter what it is saying and any poet who mixes the point of the actual world with the poetry of sound interests and attracts me more than I am able to say. In my student years it was Yeats who seemed supreme in this regard. There were lines of Yeats that were to ring in my head for years. Many times man lives and dies between his two eternities that of grace and that of soul and ancient Ireland knew it all. I could hazard a guess that all the most impassioned seductive arguments against the artist's active involvement in politics can be found in Yates. It was this dialogue between art and politics that excited me in his work along with the sound of his language never his elaborate mythological systems. I know I learned two things

from his poetry in those two things were at war with each other. One was that poetry can be about can root itself in politics even if it is a defense of privilege even if it deplores revolutionary commitment. It can and may have to account for itself politically consciously situate itself amid political conditions without sacrificing intensity of language. The other the politics leads only to bitterness and abstractness of mind makes women shrill and hysterical and is finally a waste of beauty and talent. Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. There was absolutely nothing in the literary canon I knew to counter this idea. The second idea Elizabeth Barrett Browning is anti-slavery and feminist poetry H-D's anti-war and woman identified

poetry like the radical Yes revolutionary work of Langston Hughes and Muriel Rukeyser were still buried by the academic literary canon. But the first idea was extremely important to me. A poet one who was as it were certified could actually write about political themes could weave the names of political activists into a poem. But Donna and McBride and Connelly and purse now and in time to come wherever green is worn are changed changed utterly A terrible beauty is born. As we all do when young and searching for what we can't even name yet. I took what I could use where I could find it where the ideas or who forms that we need are banished. We look for their residues wherever we can place them. But there was one major problem with this. I had been born a woman and I was trying to

think in actis of poetry and the possibility of making poems were a truly universal. That is a gender neutral realm in the universe of the masculine paradigm. I naturally absorbed ideas about women sexuality power from the subject typically of male poets. The dissonance between these images and the daily events of my own life demanded a constant footwork of the imagination a kind of perpetual translation and an unconscious fragmentation of identity. Woman from poet. These are the marks of any inward colonization and they draw their power from the fact that they are not named or if named are dismissed as trivial. Every group that lives under the name and image making power of a dominant culture experiences this mental colonization and needs an art which can resist it. But at the middle of the

fifties I had no very clear idea of my place in the world or even that such an idea was an important resource for a writer to have. I knew that marriage and motherhood experiences which were supposed to be truly womanly left me feeling strangely disempowered adrift. But I never had to think about bread itself as a primary issue and what I knew of blood was that mine was white and that white was better off much as my parents had worried about questions of social belonging and acceptability. I had never had to swallow rage or humiliation to earn a paycheck. The literature I had read only rarely suggested it to many people it is a common everyday fact of life to be hungry. I thought I was well educated in that Cold War atmosphere which is never really ended. We heard a lot about the indoctrinating of people in the Soviet Union. The egregious rewriting of history to conform to communists dog

but like most Americans I had been taught a particular version of our history. The version of the propertied white male and in my early 20s I did not even realize this as a younger and then an older woman growing up in the white mainstream American culture. I was destined to piece together for the rest of my life laboriously and with much in my training against me. The history that really concerned me on which I was coming to rely as a poet. The only history upon which both as a woman and as a poet I could find any grounding at all. The history of the dispossessed. And I began searching for some clue or key to life not only in poetry but in political writers the writers I found were Mary Wollstonecraft Simone de Beauvoir and James Baldwin. Each of them helped me to realize that what it seems simply the way things are could actually be a social

construct then official to some people and detrimental to others and that these constructs could be criticized and changed the myths and obsessions of gender. The myths and obsessions of race the violent exercise of power in these relationships could be identified their territories could be mapped they were not simply part of my private turmoil a secret misery and individual failure. I did not yet know what I a white woman had to say about the racial obsessions of the white consciousness. But I did begin to resist the apparent splitting of poet from woman thinker from woman and to write what I feared was political poetry. And in this I had very little encouragement from the literary people I knew. But I did plant courage and vindication in words like Baldwin's any real change implies the break up of the world as one has always known it. The

loss of all that gave one an identity. The end of safety. I don't know why I found these words encouraging. Perhaps because they made me feel less alone. The idea of freedom so much invoked during World War Two had become pretty abstract politically in the 50s. Freedom was supposed to be what the Western democracies believe in and the Iron Curtain Soviet bloc countries were deprived of the existentialist philosophers who were beginning to be read and discussed among young intellectuals spoke of freedom as something connected with revolt. But in reading the Bogor and Borgen I began to touch the concrete reality of being unfree how continuous and permeating and corrosive a condition it is. And how it is maintained through culture. Even more than through the use of force

I am telling you this from a backward perspective from where I stand now at the time I could not have summed up the effect these writers had on me. I only knew that I was reading them with the same passion and need that I brought to poetry that they were beginning to penetrate my life. I was beginning to feel as never before that I had some grasp some way of seeing which helped me to ask the questions I needed to ask. But there were many voices then is now warning the North American artist against quote mixing politics with art. There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration a possession by universal forces on related to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist concerned with merely temporary in local disturbances. The

song is higher than the struggle and the artist must choose between politics here defined as birth bound factionalism corrupt power struggles and art which exists on some pure land Sanden plain. This view of literature has dominated literary criticism in England in America for nearly a century. In the 50s in the early 60s there was much shaking of heads. If an artist was found meddling in politics art was mystical and universal but the artist was also apparently irresponsible and emotional and politically naive. I think many white North Americans fear are now virtually political art because it might persuade us emotionally of what we think we are rationally against. It might get to worse on a level we have lost touch with. Undermine the safety we have built for ourselves. Remind us of what is dead or left forgotten. This clear

attributes real power to the voices of passion and of poetry which connect us with all that is not simply white chauvinist male supremacist straight puritanical with what is dark at them in an inverted primitive volatile sinister. All of these in quotes. Yet we are told that political poetry for example is doomed to grind down into mere rhetoric and jargon to become one dimensional simplistic by two pretties that in writing protest literature that is writing from a perspective which may not be male or white or heterosexual or middle class. We sacrifice the universal that in writing of injustice we are limiting our scope grinding a political ax so political poetry is suspected of immense subversive power yet accused of being by definition bad writing impotent lacking in breadth.

No wonder if the North American poet finds herself or himself slightly crazed by the double messages. By 1956 I began dating each of my poems by year. I did this because I was finished with the idea of a poem as a single encapsulated event a work of art complete in itself. I knew my life was changing my work was changing and I needed to indicate to readers my sense of being engaged in a long continuing process. It seems to me now that this was an oblique political statement a rejection of the dominant critical idea that the points text should be read as frozen in time and separate from the poets everyday life. It was a declaration that life itself was larger and denser than any single coin could convey in and of itself.

In my own case as soon as I published in 1963 a book of poems which was informed by any conscious sexual politics I was told in print that this work was bitter personal and that I had sacrificed the sweetly flowing measures of my earlier books for a ragged line and a coarse and voice. It took me a long time not to hear those opinions internally whenever I picked up my pen. But I was writing at the beginning of a decade of political revolt and hope and activism. The conditions for becoming a consciously self-affirming Lee political poet were there as they had not been when I had begun to publish a decade earlier. Out of the black civil rights movement amid the marches and Syrians in the streets and on campuses a new generation of black writers began to speak. And older generations to be reprinted and re read

poetry readings were infused with the spirit of collective rage and hope. Why poets also were writing and reading aloud poems addressing the war in Southeast Southeast Asia as part of the movement against United States militarism and imperialism. In many of these points you sensed the poet's desperation in trying to encompass in words the reality of napalm the pacification of villages trying to make vivid in poetry but seem to have little effect. When shown on television but there was little location of the self the poet's own identity as a man or woman. As I wrote in another connection the enemy is always outside the self. The struggle somewhere else. I had perhaps through reading Baldwin and de Beauvoir some nascent idea that Vietnam and the lovers bed as I phrased them were connected. I found myself in the late

sixties trying to graft these connections in poetry even before I called myself a feminist or a lesbian. I thought driven to bring together in my understanding and in my poems the political world out there the world of children dynamited or napalm and of the urban ghetto and militarist violence and the supposedly private lyrical world of sex and of male female relationships. This is the final section of a long poem called The burning of paper instead of children written in 1968. I am composing on the typewriter late at night thinking of today how well we all spoke a language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English Puritan Milton's people suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Jerome who could not read spoke some peasant form of French some of the

suffering are. It is hard to tell the truth. This is America. I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger you are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are claims of napalm in Peyton's will Maryland. I know it hurts to burn the typewriter is overheated my mouth is burning. I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor's language. And this is from a sequence called the blue Gospels written in 1969. Paine made her conservative where the matches touched her flesh. She wears a scar. The police arrive at dawn like death in childbirth. City of accidents your clue map is the tangling of all our life lines. The moment when a feeling enters the body is political. This touch is political.

Sometimes I dream we have floating on water hand in hand and sinking without terror. By the end of the 1960s an autonomous movement of women was declaring that the personal is political. That statement was necessary because another political movement of that decade the power relation of men to women. The question of women's roles and men's roles have been dismissed often contemptuously as the spear of personal life. Sex itself was not seen as political except for interracial sex. Women were now talking about domination not just in terms of economic exploitation militarism colonialism imperialism but within the family in marriage in child rearing in the heterosexual act itself. Breaking the mental barrier that separated private from public life thought in itself like an enormous surge toward liberation for a woman doesn't gauged every

aspect of her life was on the line. We began naming and acting on issues we had been told were trivial unworthy of mention rape by husbands or lovers. The boss's hand groping the employee's breast. The woman beaten in her home with no place to go. The woman sterilized when she sought an abortion. The lesbian penalized for her private life by loss of her child her lease her job. We pointed out that the fact that women earn 59 cents to every dollar earned by men has enormous repercussions in private life and in the crossover between personal and political. We were also pushing at the limits of experience reflected in literature or certainly in poetry. To write directly and overtly as a woman out of a woman's body and experience to take women's existence as seriously as seriously as a theme and source for art was something I had been hungering to do.

Needing to do all my writing life it placed me nakedly place to place with both Tara and anger. It did indeed imply the breakdown of the world as I had always known it. The end of safety. To paraphrase Baldwin again but it released tremendous energy in me as in so many other women to have that way of writing affirmed and validated in a growing political movement. I felt for the first time the closing of the gap between poet and woman. Women have understood that we needed an arc of our own to remind us of our history and what we might be to show us our truth faces all of them including the unacceptable to speak of what has been muffled in colder silence to make concrete the values our movement was bringing forth out of consciousness raising speak out and activism. But we were and are working and writing not only within the women's community. We are trying to build a political and cultural movement in the

heart of capitalism in a country where racism assumes every form of physical institutional and psychic violence and in which more than one person in seven lives below the poverty line. The United States and its movement is rooted in the United States a nation with a particular history of hostility both to art and to socialism where art has been in capsule aided as a commodity a saleable artifact something to be taught in MFA programs that requires a special staff of arts administrators. Something you gotta have. Without exactly knowing why. As a lesbian feminist poet and writer I need to understand how this location affects me along with the realities of blood and bread within this nation. As women I think it is essential that we admit and explore our cultural identities our national identities even as we reject

the patriotism jingoism nationalism offered us as the American way of life. As feminist artists in the United States we do not want to perpetuate that chauvinism but we still have to struggle with its prevailing sickness in our culture. It's residues in ourselves. In Nicaragua last July I encountered not only poets in government but a noncombatant respect for and belief in the necessity of art to bring people together not simply for joy and entertainment but to help them a shared old skin's make concrete their needs and their dreams. Though there is a determination that the conscious artists those who already have been identified as such shall bring art to the people which means for them not only to understand but to produce it. Does this mean then an art of socialist realism expounding a correct line.

The Sandinista program addressed this question early in the revolutionary process and this is from a speech made by by ah the arts are say at the inauguration of the First Assembly of cultural workers in Managua Nineteen eighty just after the victory of the Sandinistas. We can fall into the trap that in order to make revolutionary painting we must paint companeros in green with rifles in hand or barefoot children in the barrios because we believe that this alone reflects the revolution or we may write poetry that talks only of combat and struggle. It is necessary to avoid calling into excessive politicization at the expense of art but the means must be found in which all cultural and artistic activity can contribute to the elimination of the negative values inherited from domination and at the same time can

contribute to exalting developing and pondering the new values rising out of the revolution. Rosario minister of cultural more recently observed we don't try to impose any style of formulas. We try to open the doors to creativity and imagination. The artist's participation in the revolutionary process assures the creation of revolutionary art are created by artists who make rather than just observe the revolution. Working as I do in the context of a movement whose artists are addressing the profound ethical and political questions of our time I have felt released from the old dichotomy between art and politics. Though the presence of the dichotomy out there in American life is one of many impoverishing forces of capitalist patriarchy. I began to sense what it might be to write as a woman struggle as a woman

in a society which took seriously the necessity for poetry. When I read Margaret Randall's translations of contemporary Cuban women poets in a collection called Breaking the silences. This book had a profound effect on me. The consistently high level of art the immense variety the pervasive sense of connectedness with the world and in the poet's individual statement the affirmation of an organic relation between poetry and the changes taking place in the lives of the Cuban people. It was partly because of that book that I went to Nicaragua not because I thought or even hoped that everyone was a poet but because I hoped to glimpse a little of what a new struggling society committed to social justice could mean for artists. I encountered an amazing belief in art in the natural fusion of art with a passion for the survival and dignity of all its people.

And I had to ask myself how does it drain us here in North America. What happens to the heart of the artist. What toll is taken of art. How is it curbed invalidated in a society which so depends on our alienation. I write for the still fragmented parts in me trying to bring them together. Whoever can read and use any of this I write to them as well. I write in full knowledge that the majority of the world's illiterates are women. That I live in a country where 40 percent of the people can barely read and 20 percent of functionally illiterate. I believe that these facts are directly connected to the fragmentations I suffer in myself that we are all in this together because I can write it all and I think of all the ways women especially have been prevented from

writing because my words are read and taken seriously because I see my work as part of something larger than my own life or the history of literature. I feel a responsibility to keep searching for teachers to widen and deepen the sources from which I write to liberate my own consciousness to examine the ego that speaks in my poems not political correctness but ignorance. Solid twosome laziness dishonesty. Automatic writing. I look everywhere for signs of that fusion I have glimpsed in the women's movement and most recently in Nicaragua in a novel or Tony or still James Baldwin a painting by Frida Kahlo a poem by Judy Gross or three Lord or Nancy more a song or Nina Simone. This kind of art like the art of so many

women so many marginalized people is not produced as a commodity but as part of a long conversation with the elders and with the future. And yes I do live and work believing in a future such artists draw on the tradition both a political struggle and spiritual continuity. Nothing need be lost. No beauty need be sacrificed. The heart does not turn to a stone. And you. Miss Reid said that he'd be willing to receive questions and I'm going to ask the first one at the very beginning.

Your statement that was quoted to you you love Nicaragua. Everyone there was a poet. That sounds like rhetoric to me. What is it me. Well I'm not altogether sure what it meant to the particular woman who said it. And it's not a statement that I would make about Nicaragua or any place. There's a sense in which the word poet designates something very large and something very particular in its larger sense I would believe that everyone everywhere has that capacity for. Standing in relation to passion to the Sacred to the images that speak more than any abstract language can speak. And I think that many people who have very little to do with abstract language are much closer to the relationship to things. I took it that this young woman was talking about the excitement of

finding that there could be a country in which a man like a Nesta Carter now who was a member of the junta and a very very major moving force in that revolution is also a well known and admired Polaroid that there is respect for poetry which I certainly found there. It is not seen as a contradiction that a person who would be competent to carry forward the process of reconstructing a country and a society that has lived for decades under domination and colonization imperialism that that there would be no contradiction between someone who could assist in that process also being a poet whereas I think that here as I have said we we dismiss the idea of the poet as the the incompetent the politically naive the person with their head in the clouds made a wonderful statement which I really would like you to follow up on.

The statement was. As women I think it essential that we admit and explore our cultural identities our national identities even as we reject the patriotism jingoism nationalism offered to the American way of life. I try. I think it's by now a truism in the women's movement that simply being women does not mean that we're all the same or that there is some automatic and transcendent unity only the differences of blood and bread and many other kinds of differences must be have been and are being explored and that you do not build a movement out of the worldview of women or people coming out of any particular single group. And I want to I want to extend that for myself. I mean I found it very important very necessary to extend that not only to questions of

cultural ethnic racial background inheritance sort of the ground on which we stand but our location in this world as women in the United States of America which is a very particular vantage point. And I tried to talk earlier a little bit about that danger of slipping into that white western or particularly United States solipsism of assuming that our values are the most advanced. Our view of things is the comprehensive one and that we should be able to pronounce on the priorities of women in other parts of the world. I think it's a very very tempting and easy position to slide into. Your questions responses to the first member of the audience to speak was a man who wanted to know if Mr. Rich felt that her writing was in any way hurt by her

commitment to politics. I don't feel that I was not writing political poetry before the 1960s I just think that it was unconfessed unconscious of its orientation. I was speaking as a certain kind of eye without without having a sense of of location of identity of relationship to other kinds of eyes in the world. But I think it was still political. So that's that's a hard question for me to add answer. I want to be able to write a number of kinds of poems and I want to be able to write poems which are very immediately comprehensible and crystal clear. And I also want to be able to write points that are very complicated but also clear and I don't mean that I want to be able to write a sort of single issue being you know boring pointless when I say crystal clear I mean I want to be able to focus in a certain way and use a certain kind of language and

I don't there's a whole spectrum of crimes of poems that I want to be able to write all of which I would consider political but some might be perceived as more out front political by people who have a notion of what political poetry use. And it's important but it's important to me to be able to do all of these things as much as possible. How does one whose life hasn't been a life of struggle. Someone who is white male heterosexual upper class woman how does someone with that background with Erikson personal history write with the language of struggle. In other words this is a person like that I'm speaking of myself. How does how can I write anything other than about rolling hills and about Brooks says I haven't found that person struggle within myself. OK I guess what I'm. Going to.

Question. If you're if you're serious about that if you're not simply saying why should I. You need to look at the teachers and you need to look in yourself and ask yourself what you are hiding from yourself what pain what shame what guilt you need to open up a lot of cans of worms because your position is not a simple one. It's not that they're not your own your life is this connected to all these lives was it was is all these lives are connected to each other. But but you cut off from the connections and you you're going to have to look for the teachers who can help you and I don't mean just in the sense of college teachers obviously the teachers out in the world the teachers who are artists who are writers who can help him make that connection why kind of a second question Michel. Well I says we have little time I'm sorry that I would like to give you some of the women here.

Could you say a little bit about how those of us in the women's movement can deal with the conflict that we feel between writing theory and poetry from a women's identified point of view in which we identify with and love women as our way of being feminist. And those those of us and those aspects of US which feel that the class and race oppression is that you've talked about identify as with wider struggles and with men and women who are involved in the struggles. That's a very crucial problem. And I think it is a problem precisely because we are living in a fragmented culture we're living in a fragmented society a society in which so much is done to keep us from being able to make connections to ally ourselves with others at least on whatever grounds We share of of necessity and and belief in

values. Sometimes I feel that way. It is though you need to be right in that everything all of the time. And yet it's it's almost impossible to be writing about it with everything all of the time that we are not in a context where we can assume anything. I mean there's a way in which fragmentations can run so deep that we don't know who reading this is going to is going to understand the context out of which it is coming. I think the question is different perhaps with someone writing theory than for someone writing poetry and there is a way in which certain things can be spelled out in the theoretical piece of writing even to the extent of just the way you use sources the way you use footnotes bibliography showing the reader that you know something that you said is in a context which is already been established somewhere in poetry I think you know we are having to

draw on this very profound image making imagination charging power of poetry where it's possible almost in an in in the way that dreams do to layer a great many things. Ian on top of each other but it's damned hard and it is a struggle. The last question asked of most rich was whether she had any of her recent work with her to share. Well actually I do. I did bring one back ya. I wanted to read this because in some way I feel like this is a this poem in its own completely different way says a great deal that I was trying to talk about tonight in prose. It's called North American time when my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct. No on really image issues escaping Beyond Borders

when walking in the street I found my themes cut out for me knew what I would not report for fear of enemies usage. Then I began to wonder. Everything we write will be used against us or against those we love. These are the terms. Take them all leave them. Poetry never stood a chance of standing outside his story in what pure easier would that be. One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spray paint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill. We moved but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended. And this is verbal privilege. Try sitting at a typewriter one calm summer evening at a table by a window in the country. Try pretending your time does not exist

that you are simply you. But the imagination simply strays like a great unintentional. Try telling yourself you are not accountable to the life of your tribe. The breath of your planet. It doesn't matter what you think. Words are responsible all you can do is choose them or choose to remain silent or you never had a choice. Which is why the words that do stand are responsible. And this is a verbal privilege. Suppose you want to write a woman braiding another woman's hair straight down. Always be in Shell's employee strand plats or cornrows. You had better know the thickness the length the pattern. Why she decides to braid her hair how it is done to her. What country it happens in. What else happens in that country. You

have to know these things. Poet sister words whether we like it or not. Stand in a time of their own. No use protesting. I wrote that before current I was exiled Rosa looks and Borg Malcolm. Anna Mae are quote murdered before Treblinka Birkenau Hiroshima before shock will be off for Bangladesh. Boston Atlanta. So wait till they root aside those places names of places sheered from the almanac of North American time. I am thinking this in a country where words are stolen out of mouths as bread is stolen out of mouths where poets don't go to jail for being poets but for being dark skinned female poor. I am writing this in a time when anything we write can be used against those we love. Where the context is never give them though we try to explain over and

over for the sake of poetry at least I need to know these things. Sometimes gliding at night in a plane over New York City I have felt like some messenger call to enter the hall to engage the speed of light and darkness. A grandiose idea born of line but underneath the grandiose idea is the thought that what I am a student Gage after the plane has raged on to the tarmac after climbing my stairs sitting down at my old window is meant to break my heart and reduce me to silence in North America. Time marches on without moving only releasing a certain North American Pain. Julia wrote that my grandfather was a slave is my grief. Had he been a master that would have been my shame. A poet's

words hung over a door in North America in the year nineteen eighty three the almost full moon rises timelessly speaking of change out of the Bronx the Harlem River the drowned towns of the Quabbin the pilfered burial grounds the toxic swamps the testing ground and I start to speak again. Why. You've been listening to writers speak featuring Adrienne Rich feminist poet and social critic. This is the fourth in a series of seven radio programs each of which will present a prominent Massachusetts writer writer speak is presented by the Institute for Advanced Study in the humanities at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. This program is made possible by a grant from the Massachusetts foundation for humanities and public

policy which is a program of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Executive producers Susan Brown and Julius Lester producer Patricia Meyers and engineers Scott backroom and art steel tape editing assistant Judith Gold thank you for listening.