Thesis

Poetry and Politics in Adrienne Rich (1951-1999)

 

by Rodrigo Espinosa Cabral

 

 

This thesis was defended and approved on 21st February 2001

in Florianópolis - SC - Brasil,

at Federal University of Florianópolis UFSC

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree

Master in English and its respectives Literatures.

Copyright © 02/21/2001 by Rodrigo Espinosa Cabral. Reprinting of this thesis in its complete, unmodified form for strictly non-profit purposes is both authorized and encouraged

provided that this copyright is included.

 

Chapter 4

From Verbal Privilege and Difficulty to Salvage (1986-1999)

Published in 1986, Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems, as the title suggests, marks Rich’s proposition in discussing her country in relation to her life. This book was written from 1981 to 1985, a period in which the author published two essays: "Split at the Root: an essay on Jewish Identity," in 1982, and "Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet," in 1984. These essays confirm the observation in the last chapter that A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far would modify Rich’s intense use of women-identified themes in her poetry, releasing her to write about other issues, more related to the placement of the poet in his/her country.

"Split at the Root" is Rich’s self-analysis recovering important facts in her life, like her Jewish background, her father’s influence, her days as a schoolgirl, her heterosexual dilemmas as wife and mother, and ultimately her "lesbian existence." I believe that such reflection was necessary to organize her longings for new themes as she states in an interview with Montenegro:

Resolved or unresolved, important questions of her past intersect in poem and essay in a kind of autobiographical dialogue interweaving genres.

In his 1991 postscript for his essay "Adrienne Rich: The Poetics of Change," Albert Gelpi affirms that "‘Sources,’ like all Rich’s major poems, is an act of consolidation [of the past] and a transition to a new departure" (299). Aspects of this new departure are showed in the last section of the poem:

From Your Native Land, Your Life (YNL) on, Rich starts to search for a poetry able to extend her perceptions of the world and her "place in it." Thus, she looks for a language, a "knowing," to name the moment she lives in her country. The essay "Blood, Bread and Poetry: The Location of the Poet," published two years before YNL discusses the "series of choices" leading a poet to write the way s/he writes. In the essay, Rich considers what art means in a "society committed to values other than profit and consumerism" (250), like Nicaragua, and in the American capitalism. In the former, people were supposed to have "a belief in art . . . [as] a precious resource to be made available for all, one necessity for the rebuilding of a scarred, impoverished, and still-bleeding country," whereas in the latter, art is seen "as commodity, luxury, or suspect activity." Towards the conclusion, Rich questions herself:

The poem "North American Time" discusses those questions. As the title indicates, the poem depicts the speaker’s attempt of freezing a specific moment or "Time" in North America. This time is related to the speaker’s reflections on the so-called politically correct way of speaking that sets a kind of self-censorship even in the speaker’s freest activities, e.g. walking in the street or dreaming:

As demonstrated in previous chapters, Rich’s speakers rely on dreams to express themselves, "Bears," "Nightbreak," and "I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus" are examples of this feature. In "North American Time," the politically correct tendency interferes even in the speaker’s dreams, i.e., in the persona’s inner place for the unconscious and unrepressed images. Since such static also affects her conscious period, she begins to wonder. In his essay "Mischling and Métis: Common and Uncommon Languages in Adrienne Rich and Aimé Césaire," Jonathan Monroe observes that the poem evolves from

Thus, the other eight sections of the poem develop the speaker’s reflections and wondering on her country’s moment.

The second section discusses the responsibility a writer should have, because of the implications of his/her texts: "Everything we write / will be used against us / or against those we love" (11-13). It is worth noting the persona’s movement from "I" to "We," in this section. Rich specifies her target audience among the ones who are attacked because of what they have written—The "We" refers to poets in general—since Rich informs what literary genre she is considering: "Poetry never stood a chance / of standing outside history" (16-17). In closing this section, Rich argues that the writers change, but through their words remain and "become responsible / for more than we [poets] intended / and that is verbal privilege" (25-27). Her point is: once one is able to express him/herself, when one uses language to mean something, they are privileged for having expressed what many (oppressed) could not express.

In the third part of the poem, Rich exemplifies the previous idea:

Try sitting at a typewriter

one calm summer evening

at a table by a window

in the country, (28-31)

Rich invites fellow poets and readers to assume the role of a writer, in a condition of total solipsism, recuperating a very bucolic idea of a writer. Then, she challenges them to experience their writer’s function as something apart from their actual lives:

[. . .] try pretending

your time does not exist

that you are simply you

that the imagination simply strays

like a great moth, unintentional

try telling yourself

you are not accountable

to the life of your tribe

the breath of your planet (32-40)

The word "planet" is the end of the section; after it, the reader is left alone, thinking. The lack of punctuation seems to reinforce the speaker’s attitude of setting this reader free to follow the flow of imagination.

Although having affirmed that poetry has a congenital link to history, the persona encourages this writer to be detached from a social context. There is an irony when the speaker instigates: "try telling yourself / you are not accountable" (38-39) for your "tribe" and "planet." Since Rich invited her readers to try to imagine this implicitly contradictory situation, there is a risk of them failing in their attempt. Rich, however, does not present a solution for the exercise proposed. Rather, in the fourth section of the poem she states that:

Counter-arguing Bakhtin’s view presented in the first chapter, these words interact with alien discourse precisely for helping constitute it. Rich states that "it does not matter" whether the poets she is addressing succeed or not in supposing to be detached writers, because their "Words are found responsible." This means that words belong to a linguistic system and are used by local and global communities of individuals that refer to and make sense of the world through words themselves. Rich classifies those individuals in two segments: the ones who choose words or write (becoming responsible for their choices) and the ones who remain silent, resigned. There is also a third segment, the ones who "never had a choice" or a language to express themselves. The poem "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children," analyzed in the prior chapter, presents an example of this third segment, which is oppressed by the lack of a language able to express their needs. Because of them, the ones who have the chance and to choose to manifest themselves and express their needs are said to possess "verbal privilege."

Besides, Rich’s lexical choices in sections II and IV sound like a parody of police jargon "You have the right to remain silent. Everything you say can be used against you in a law court." This dialogism reinforces the relation of oppression between powerful (authorities) and powerless (oppressed). Taking into account Rich’s 1968 poem "I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus," in which she declares to be a woman "with certain powers/ and those powers severely limited / by authorities whose faces I rarely see," it is concluded that in the eighties her poetry changed, using those "certain [language] powers" to appropriate the authorities’ voice facing them, whereas in the sixties she avoided such confrontation.

In section V, the poem demonstrates how to use such verbal privilege. For that, the persona urges her readers/poets: "Suppose you want to write / of a woman braiding / another woman’s hair—" (48-50). The braiding is described from the point of view of a woman that knows the art of braiding, in a way designed to transport the reader to the scene. Besides this personal knowledge, the speaker states that:

you had better know [. . .]

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]

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 (53; 55-59)

Such search for public and personal contexts are in accordance to Theodor Adorno’s view, in which the universal is mediated by the personal, i.e., the writings of a poet as a member of a society have a natural right—for Rich a responsibility—of capturing particularities of its time.

In the sixth section, the persona narrows down the generality of her addressees: "Poet: sister: words— / whether we like or not— / stand in a time of their own" (60-62). Since in the fifth section she had stated that "you have to know" the contexts surrounding a writing, there is a curious apparent contradiction when the speaker claims that there is:

No use protesting [against words' own time]. I wrote that

before Kollontai was exiled

Rose Luxemburg, Malcolm,

Anna Mae Aquash, murdered,

before Treblinka, Birkenau,

Hiroshima, before Sharpeville,

Biafra, Bangladesh, Boston,

Atlanta, Soweto, Beirut, Assam (62-70)

This apparent contradiction of the personae's initially denying the importance of the context is undone in the last lines of the section: "—Those faces, names of places / sheared from the almanac / of North American time" (62-73). Because of the last lines, the list of places and personages, which Monroe calls "litany" (305), functions as examples of contextualized social problems, wars and violence that, for having caused abundant suffering, should be taken into consideration. However, this does not happen since they are "sheared from the almanac / of North American time." Rich seems to treat with irony and a certain anger the separation of the words in a poem from the context in which they are/were inserted. Thus, although she affirms to the sisterhood of poets that there is "No use protesting," her final lines justify her attitude. There is "no use in protesting" because in North America faces and places (attempts at contextualization) are "sheared," i.e., in the US, "the context is never given" (83), as she explains in section VII.

The seventh section elucidates and contextualizes her anger and irony:

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 given

though we try to explain, over and over

For the sake of poetry at least

I need to know these things (74-86)

The written things are misinterpreted on purpose and then used against their poets because the contexts in which they were produced are not considered in a tendentious reading. Rich and the supportive audience of poets demonstrate a good will in "try to explain, over and over" (84) the contexts of production, "for the sake of poetry, at least" (85) which reveals some aesthetic preoccupation.

Rich wrote this poem 15 years before Harold Bloom's essay commented in the introduction of this study, but many of the issues he criticizes in committed poets or, for him, "the enemies of the aesthetic" (2) were already reason for discussion in Rich's poetry. In dictatorial regimes, poets go to jail "for being poets," but in a segregating society like the American, they face prejudices that can "jail" their work. This occurs if their writings are not in accordance to editorial expectations, which constantly reflect the particular taste of a male WASP dominant elite. Bloom meets these expectations.

In section VIII, the speaker retakes a calm and reflexive tone. With her anger under control, Rich imagines this scene:

Sometimes, gliding at night

in a plane over New York City

I have felt like some messenger

called to enter, called to engage

this field of light and darkness.

A grandiose idea, born of flying.

But underneath the grandiose idea

is the thought that what I must engage

after the plane has raged onto the tarmac

after climbing my old stairs, sitting down

at my old window

is meant to break my heart and reduce me to silence. (87-98)

Harbored by the convenience of a night flight, and enjoying the ample visibility of New York City lights, she confesses to have "felt like some messenger." Momentarily, "North American Time" reminds Rich's heroic posture in the sixties, in the prime of her life. However, on thinking about "what [she] must engage" when the flight (the grandiose idea) is over, she feels tired, and a simple act like "climbing" her "old stairs" demands effort. In her house, she sits at her window, an attitude that represents her preoccupations with the external world. There, what she must engage "is meant to break [her] and reduce [her] to silence." This passage raises some questions: what has happened to the powerful woman "with the nerves of a panther" from the sixties? Where is the curious diver and dreamer poet of the seventies? Is she really heartbroken and reduced to silence in the eighties?

The final section answers these questions. Although reality breaks her dream of being a messenger or a spokeswoman, silencing her, and though she concludes that in the USA time is pain, other elements in the world, like the possibility of change, suggested by the lyric image of a raising moon, motivate her to continue writing:

In North America time stumbles on

without moving, only releasing

a certain North American pain.

Julia the Burgos wrote:

That my grandfather was a slave

is my grief; had he been a master

that would be 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 mounds

the toxic swamps, the testing-grounds

and I start to speak again (99-115)

Rich uses the voice of the Puerto Rican poet and revolutionary Julia de Burgos (1917-53) as if assuring herself that her efforts are not in vain, that there is grief and dignity in voicing the voiceless, but no shame. Moreover, in stating the year, Rich makes a point of contextualizing her poem, since she had affirmed that in North America the "context is never given" (83). After giving the context, she describes a timeless (and thus decontextualized) moon. It can be said that this natural satellite, for its beauty, is a lyrical element that stands for change associated with the moon's revolutions.

Rich sees this lunar light of change "out of" (111) places that represent different types of oppression. While the moon illuminates her, these poor or polluted places remain in the dark. This darkness can also be associated with the absence of context on the realities of the referred places. For example, what kind of people live in Bronx, how they live, or what was the history of the five towns drowned (or "sheared?") by the Quabbin reservoir in Massachusetts. If her readers lack this previous knowledge, which can occur because some of the places she is referring to are omitted or were "sheared" from the North American time, her poem encourages them to search for this further knowledge, increasing their critical awareness. In this sense, Rich's poetry does not provide a single and clear answer for a given social problem, as a tendentious text could propose. Rather, it offers its readers a possibility of whetting their minds. Motivated by the social lyricism of the moon as a metaphor for social change, Adrienne Rich breaks the silence in section VIII and starts "to speak again" (115).

Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988, published in 1989, is an evidence of Rich's continuum speaking. In the collection, the poem "Delta" is an account of how difficult it is to track Rich's movements, as Marcia Oliveira observed in her dissertation "Adrienne Rich: Towards a Feminist Aesthetic," which dealt with feminism in Rich's poetry from 1951 to 1973. In "Delta," Rich seems to play with her readers and critics' attempts of taking her for granted:

If you have taken this rubble for my past

raking through it for fragments you could sell

know that I long ago moved on

deeper into the heart of the matter

If you think you can grasp me, think again:

my story flows in more than one direction

a delta springing from the riverbed

with its five fingers spread (1-8)

Thus, flowing in several directions, the "river" Rich moved to Santa Cruz, California in the mid eighties. This change seems to have enlarged the geographical amplitude of her poetry. If, for example, in "North American Time," Rich referred mainly to sites in New York City area (in spite of the spacious title of the poem), her 1991 collection, An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991, depicts several places, drawing multiple maps.

Indeed, the title of the volume confers its poems (or maps) a sophisticated function: being an atlas. This atlas is supposed to delineate not only the world, but also its difficulties. Thus, through the title, Rich enables her poems to deal with worldly social issues. In the title poem, the difficult world is the United State of America, but other poems in the volume extend the speaker's scope to a larger geography.

A second reading of the title reveals Rich's awareness of how demanding her task is. In Greek mythology, "Atlas" was a Titan, son of Iapetus and brother of Prometheus and Epimetheus, condemned to support the sky on his shoulders. By association, according to the Webster's dictionary an "atlas" is a person who supports a heavy burden; a mainstay. Thereby, Rich names her book"Atlas," perhaps acknowledging her labored task of dealing with the difficult world.

An Atlas of the Difficult World is a book written towards the end of the Cold War, the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, and mainly during the Gulf War. For the first time, a war was broadcasted by television via satellite in real time, increasing the interest of the world in a given fact and enlarging the power and importance of news coverage corporations like CNN. Thus, terms like global village and globalization started to be more frequently pronounced since 1991. In the following years of the nineties, the popularization of communicational tools like faxes, mobile phones, personal computers, e-mail and the Internet would reinforce this worldwide connectability.

Situated in the beginning of this time in which technology was also highly used to make wars (guided missiles, radars, biological warfare) or to inform the population about them, a sixty-two-year-old Adrienne Rich reacted by writing a kind of poetic version of the facts. The title of the collection seems to engulf the importance of a global poetics (though individually-based) as a response to equally important global and individual issues.

In an interview with Paulo da Costa for the electronic magazine CiberKiosk, Rich affirms: "Poetry reaches into places in us that we are supposed to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture. Global culture is of course not a culture: it's the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many" (1). In this sense, An Atlas presents poems referring to scattered places on the Earth, such as California, New York, Berlin, Iraq, Jerusalem or Saigon. The title poem is divided in 13 sections, which somehow reflects the diffraction of the world that satellites have tried to unify, and that Rich's Atlas tries to register.

The first part of the poem binds some voices in a long first stanza, as to demonstrate that poetry is a discourse able to gather the heteroglossia of society. Some of the voices are ironic towards the lack of commitment:

The fragment above shows two different voices trying to set apart from the happenings, but becoming uneasy with that. The first voice affirms that "sleep comes hard" (22) and the other voice does not "act" to change the situation, and fenced in its individualism says: "I'm trying to hold onto my life, it feels like nothing" (26).

Rich ope

The title of Helen Vendler's essay "Mapping the Air" seems to refer particularly to this second section. Maps commonly present political borders and natural and artificial features of a place’s terrain, but not aerial characteristics. Since Rich's Atlas is actually referring to earthy locations, Vendler's title can be understood as an intricate form of saying that Rich's Atlas is useless. Vendler states that the addressees of Rich's poems, whom the critic refers to as victims "are all morally innocent" (216) (my italics). For her, Rich divides her poetry into good and evil: "the good are the weak, the social underdogs—women, blacks, lesbians, the poor, prisoners, Jews, mothers of the disappeared" (217). According to Vendler, in spite of distinguishing culprits and victims, Rich fails as a "reformer" in social improvement. Vendler points out that between Rich's condemnatory energy and active sympathy, pervades "an air of lament rather than of certainty" (217). Vendler's essay depicts how Rich had managed to denunciate social injustices, analyzing them to name oppressors. Despite recognizing Rich's initiative, Vendler affirms that Rich "never places herself among the reprobate (even in imagination), and never tarnishes the victims with evil qualities of their own" (217) (my italics). The use of a word like "never" seems to be tendentiously generalizing, mainly if we consider that Rich has delineated this dichotomy between victim and victimizer, maybe from 1968 on, placing herself among the reprobates and sharing their language through the use of heteroglossia as demonstrated in a poem like "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children."

Rich sees herself part as a "reprobate," and part as a victimizer, as she has referred to in "Splitting at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity." In addition, since in a poem like "For Ethel Rosenberg" Rich admits having been politically oppressive in her way, Vendler's generalization loses its strength. A brief reflection on Adrienne Rich’s existence as a Radcliffe undergraduate poet in a male environment, wife, mother, feminist, antiwar activist, Jewish, and lesbian would serve to justify her natural identification with the oppressed. In her essay, Vendler does not take into account the prejudice, suffering, anger and political fight that Rich has been facing during her lifetime because of her political attitude.

Back in 1968, she had committed herself as "a woman sworn to lucidity," "a woman with a certain mission," and in the next decades she kept her word. This implies more than commitment, a vow that can explain Rich's misplacement among the dominant, "not even in imagination," (217) as Vendler noted. Conversely to what Vendler proposed, Rich defends more and more the oppressed, the victims, starting from her own context as a woman and gradually intensifying her defense by assuming several voices to expose their problems or by opening her personal experiences to these questions.

"North American Time" is a call for the importance of being accountable to the world as a poet, interweaving personal and political realms. In "An Atlas," the incisive mentioning of American landscapes and geographically distant cities and states in its first sections is an evidence of this dialogue between poet and society.

In the fourth section, the speaker keeps mentioning places in a fragmented way. According to Alice Templeton this separation reinforces the social distances in the US:

Despite these contradictions, in section IV, Rich calls the reader's attention to a natural beauty supposed to unify the country:

Late summers, early autumns, you can see something that binds

the map of this country together: the girasol, orange gold-

petalled

with her black eye, laces the roadsides from Vermont to

California (176-180)

The color and abundance of the flowers Rich describes as "Spendthrift" is compared to "human wastefulness, the pollution of the land and water, and the discouragement of those who could repair the damage" (157) as Templeton points out. In addition, the form of the poem intensifies Rich's insistence on highlighting the segregation of the United States. The girasol, described as "orange gold-/petalled," can stand for an allusion to the US, beautiful, but divided (in petals). The isolation of the word petal and its placement just below the word "country" contributes to fix this idea of a petalled (divided) country.

Section V brings historical moments that, in accordance to Templeton, acknowledge "that one of the circumstances that bind human community is a vulnerability to violence and accident" (158). Instead of flowers and nature, this section unifies the country with both positive and negative historic aspects, recalling for example the end of the Civil War in Appomattox, Virginia, battles with Indians at Wounded Knee, state troopers' abuse of civilians in Los Alamos, Alabama and thus:

Catch if you can your country's moment, begin

where any calendar's ripped-off: Appomattox

Wounded Knee, Los Alamos, Selma, the last airlift from Saigon

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]

—catch if you can this unbound land these states without a cause (201-203; 206)

Rich demands knowledge of her readers, as she had done in "North American Time." In "An Atlas," however, she challenges them, saying "Catch if you can," for it is not easy to catch (memorize, know and feel the implication of such facts). One reason for this difficulty could be their exclusion from the "almanac of the North American Time." Recognizing the difficulties of her poetry in understanding "the difficult world," Rich asks herself and her reader: "Where are we moored? / What are the bindings? / What behooves us" (212-214) ?

Section IX retakes an idea of loneliness similar to her 1971 poem "Song," written about one year after her husband's death. In "Song," Rich discusses how it is to be lonely: "You're wondering if I'm lonely: / OK then, yes, I'm lonely / As a plane rides lonely and level" (1-3). In the poem published in Diving into the Wreck, Rich uses metaphors to concede her loneliness a transitional aspect; she is lonely like a "plane," i.e., she is also moving and somehow enjoying beautiful and hard to access landscapes. Through images invoking a certain freedom in solitude, and the hardness of facing this state, she criticizes long term relationships:

You want to ask, am I lonely?

Well, of course, lonely

as a woman driving across country

day after day, leaving behind

mile after mile

little towns she might have stopped

and lived and died in, lonely (8-14)

In the final stanza, she insists on exalting positive aspects of her solitude as she demonstrates a strength to move through difficulties, as suggested by the image of the speaker's rowing a boat surrounded by ice in the last sunset of the year, i.e., during the winter. The lyric self gathers these natural difficulties and defines them as potential energy (fire):

Twenty years later, in 1991, Rich returns to the issue of loneliness: "On this earth, in this life, as I read your story, you're lonely" (326). In "An Atlas of the Difficult World," however, the solitude is amplified as it is found in public places as bars, beaches or even among friends, couples, and during sexual intercourse:

In its two other stanzas, the poem identifies happiness in remote sites, such as the Mohave Desert and the Grand Canyon. There is a sense of communion with nature that would replenish the speaker's longings for a companion, as civilized places would not. This idea is similar to "Song's," except for the geographical contextualization given in "An Atlas," but absent in "Song." In part X, Rich continues developing the theme of solitude. This time she appropriates three prose passages from George Jackson's book Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson. According to Vandersee, Rich's quotations from Jackson's letters in her poems is a technique for using "history in unconventional but authoritative ways" (7).

If in section IV, nature united the country, in section XI its force is described as an element of destruction and disintegration. Earthquake, drought and freeze confer Monterey Bay and California an atmosphere of desolation. Rich associates these natural disasters to the outbreak of the Gulf War. Instead of girasols blossoming, Rich notes flags. Within this frozen and warlike country, the speaker tries to place herself:

Earthquake and drought followed by freezing followed by war

Flags are blossoming now where little else is blossoming

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]

Loyalties, symbols, murmurs extinguished and echoing?

Grids of states stretching westward, underground waters?

Minerals, traces, rumors I am made from, morsel, minuscule fibre, one woman

like and unlike so many, fooled as to her destiny, the scope of her task?

One citizen like and unlike so many, touched and untouched in passing

—each of us now a driven, a nucleus, a city in crisis

some busy constructing enclosures, bunkers, to escape the common fate

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]

some for whom the war is new, others for whom it merely continues

the old paroxysms of time

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]

some for whom peace is a white man's word and white man's privilege

(406-7;411-17;421-2;424)

The passage above demonstrates an Adrienne Rich no longer able to represent heroically other women. Contrary to Helen Vendler's statement that Adrienne Rich "never" includes herself among the reprobates, in this section, Rich affirms herself to be like any other citizen, as she endeavored to describe.

Closing the section, Rich restricts the concept of "a patriot," cutting its relation to the armed forces: "A patriot is not a weapon" (428), and criticizing the ongoing war in the Persian Gulf: "A patriot is a citizen trying to wake / from the burnt-out dream of innocence, the nightmare / of the white general and the Black general posed in their camouflage, / to remember her [the patriot's] true country, remember his suffering land: remember" (431-433). According to the editor's note, the generals mentioned are "General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, U. S. army commander in the Gulf during the Gulf War, and General Colin Powell, head of the U. S. Joint Chiefs of Staff" (156). In the last lines of the section, the female patriot is called to remember (like a refrain) the questions on section V: "Where are we moored? / What are the bindings? / What behooves us" (438-440)?

Section XIII "(Dedications)" demonstrates a kind of clairvoyant control over the map drawn in the previous sections. With this power, the lyric self affirms "to know" the persons she is addressing. They are distributed by several locations in her atlas, performing different functions:

I know you are reading this poem

late, before leaving your office

[. . .] I know you are reading this poem

standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]

I know you are reading this poem

in a room where too much has happened for you to bear

[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ]

I know you are reading this poem

as the underground train loses momentum and before running

up the stairs

toward a new kind of love

your life has never allowed

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove

warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand (457-485)

The poem travels through a social cartography that reinforces the intense need of different segments of the same society for poetry. Adrienne Rich describes persons reading poetry in solitude, aloof from one another. Implicitly, in the twelve lengthy poems preceding "(Dedications)," there is the idea of poetry as a force able to bind people and by extension the country together, since nature (with its earthquakes and freezes) and history (with its wars and massacres and solitude) failed in uniting the atlas harmonically, binding just its difficulties. In this sense, the use of long Whitman-like lines, is a way of validating her attempt of singing her country, as the bard had done in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, her "whitmanesque horizontally driven lines" (160), as Templeton calls them, reflect Rich's movement from the East coast to California in the mid eighties, as Albert Gelpi noted in the 1991 postscript for "Adrienne Rich: The Poetics of Change":

Other poems in the collection keep Rich's concerns for geography and social matters. "Eastern War Time" consciously talks to "I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus." There are several correspondences in terms of structure, images and metaphors allowing the recognition of Rich's intentions to write about two different historical moments. Nevertheless, although the persona remains female, she is not so self-assured or heroic anymore, as section XI in "An Atlas" showed. If in 1968, the poem had a tone of celebration, in 1991, it is under fire, facing wartime. Nothing has been conquered yet, or at least the things that in the sixties women judged to be conquered are not so useful and effective in the last decade of the century. The sentence recurrent in both poems "I am a woman" carries the time differences among them. In 1968, by saying "I am a woman," Rich reaffirmed the necessity of asserting her female condition in a society that experienced the upheaval of the women liberation movements. In the nineties, however, she is no longer celebrating this discovered femaleness, rather she is complaining, denouncing and fighting against, those "authorities" she barely saw in the sixties.

In the nineties, the images employed are more drastic and tragic and there is a lack of magic. The title "Eastern War Time" seems to point to the whole poem as a definition for the events contemporary to it. Thus, the dreamy (or magical) atmosphere presented in the 1968 poem is substituted by a harsh view of reality, in which the persona is not celebrating anymore. She is not contemplating the facts, but directly interacting with them. This is visible in the nineties’ persona: "a woman standing / with other women dressed in black / on the streets of Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem" (18-20) or "a woman standing in line for gasmasks" (22), and in other political and historical events.

Therefore, Adrienne Rich's poems in An Atlas of the Difficult World seem to be politically committed in a more direct and history-related way, since the speakers do not recur to dreams, unnamed or mythic places to express themselves. Thus, in the nineties her poetry became more engagé in relation to geo and sociological issues. For that, Rich voices a memory composed of unjust and violent events:

I’m a corpse dredged from a canal in Berlin (1-3, 5-6, 10, 17)

In Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995, published in 1995, Rich enlarges her view of history, questioning the boundaries between the collective and the individual. The poem "In Those Years" synthesizes this idea:

In those years, people will say, we lost track

of the meaning of we, of you

we found ourselves reduced to I

and the whole thing became

silly, ironic, terrible:

we were trying to live a personal life

and, yes, that was the only life

we could bear witness to

But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged

into our personal weather

They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove

along the shore, through the rags of fog

where we stood, saying I (1-14)

If in "Eastern War Time" Rich wrote from a past perspective, "In Those Years" her speaker projects a possible future by wondering about what "people will say," when they look back. Thus, the poem sounds firstly like an analysis of our present time, since people in the future would be saying—supported by the certainty of the future time—that "in those years," i.e., in the nineties, in the readers’ present time, "we lost track" (1). Starting from a predictive perspective, the analysis arouses the readers’ curiosity and hooks his/her attention. In affirming that in the current time we (poet, reader and society as a whole) moved from a previous stage of communion—"we," "you"—to the present stage of a reduced "I," Rich's speaker criticizes selfish and individualistic values.

The opposition between "We" and "I" is used to explain why we lost track: "the whole thing became / silly, ironic, terrible:" (5-6). The use of colon suggests that the speaker is going to explain why the individual no longer searched for his/her fellow: the individuals [we] "were trying to live a personal life" (7). In our competitive society commodities as e-commerce, for example, or silent families in front of TV sets diminish the interaction among people. Moreover, in search of personal success, in our self-centered existences, we no longer care about the other.

In the second and final stanza of the poem, the speaker uses a sophisticated lyric to warn us. The adverb "but," opening the final stanza, starts to give the poem an optimistic tone. Although in those years (our present) we were living self-committed lives, history (represented by "great dark birds") overflew, "screamed and plunged / into our personal weather." This means that history, characterized by a movement (track) towards the collective (history as the gathering from small tribes, villages, city-states, burgs, to huge empires and republics), offers us a possibility of retaking this lost track. For that the "beaks and pinions" of history's "dark birds" are screaming and diving into the "rags of fog" of "our personal weather." However, we seemed not to give attention to these birds, and stood saying "I," as isolated weak nestling little birds asking for help, food and communion with our beaks wide open saying "I."

As the Princeton student Abby Corson-Rikert noted, "the image of a screen of fog is critical in Rich's exposure of our isolation" (2). In her paper "Touching the Sky," Corson-Rikert identifies this fog in other poems of Dark Fields of the Republic. The man in the poem "You Drew up the Story of your Life" fears his "fogsmeared planet." "Voices," the fifth section of the poem "Inscriptions" describes "the delicate power of fog," and in "You can call on beauty still and it will leap," the seventh part of the poem "Calle Visión," talks about a "fog [that] melts the falling stars," as if our isolation deprived us even from looking for hope upward in the sky.

Besides this concern with solitude and individualism, the collection deals with other themes that Rich had already discussed in An Atlas. The poem "And Now," for instance, extends Rich's intimacy with her readers already manifested in "(Dedications)." In "(Dedications)," she knew where and under which circumstances her readers were reading her poetry. In "And Now," she declares her love towards them:

And now as you read these poems

—you whose eyes and hands I love

—you whose mouth and eyes I love

—you whose words and minds I love

As Rich uses a poem to elucidate her writing procedures, affirming to be alone (as the repetition of "I" denounces) but in contact with the public realm, she counterargues Bakhtin's separation of poetry from "alien discourse:" "I tried to listen to / the public voice of our time" (7-8). Besides, her poetry meets some of her prose statements. Her essay "The Muralist" published in What is Found There: Notes on Poetry and Politics (WIFT) is in dialogue with the passage above:

Part of the evolution she is referring to can be found in Adrienne Rich's Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998, published in 1999. In this collection she keeps the poetic process of dealing with social questions, which was intensified from Your Native Land, Your Life on. However, in Midnight Salvage, she diminishes the vehement geographic location that characterized poems like "North American Time," "An Atlas of the Difficult World" or some poems in Dark Fields, as Adam Newey, a Midnight Salvage's reviewer, affirms:

The four-part poem "The Art of Translation," in its second part, reveals Rich's refinement or "vitreous quality" in terms of poetic language:

It's only a branch like any other

green with the flare of life in it

and if I hold this end, you the other

that means it's broken

broken between us, broken despite us

broken and therefore dying

broken by force, broken by lying

green, with the flare of life in it (1-8)

With this concise two-stanza poem, Rich summarizes "The Art of Translation," (poetry itself as an act of translation) its difficulties and potentialities. She expends a minimum of words to obtain a multiplicity of meanings that make her poem transcend a single interpretation. As the branch is broken as soon as poet and reader interact, this mutual attempt of translation, represented by the image of poet and reader holding the branch is impossible.

This difficulty in communication is in accordance to Rich's thought in "The Burning of Paper Instead of Children:" "language is map of our failures" (85). In spite of these failures, since "Planetarium," in the sixties, Rich has tried this translation:

Despite the recognition of impotence in "translating," the book in general presents a hopeful tone, rarely seen in Adrienne Rich's poetry. This feeling that events can turn out for the best can explain the title of the collection, as if hope (salvage) arrived late (at midnight). This midnight can be associated to Rich’s maturity, since she was 70 when the book was released. The title poem expresses this hope among moments of criticism.

In its second section, the poem presents a conflict between academe and poetry. Rich treats with irony presumably W. H. Auden's statement that "poetry makes nothing happen."

Under the conditions of my hiring

I could profess or declare anything at all

since in that place nothing would change

So many fountains, such guitars at sunset (1-4)

Rich is bored with scholarly atmosphere, as she depicts her office in a university: "Did not want any more to sit under such a window / . . . / in that borrowed chair / with its collegiate shield at a borrowed desk.&qu

Could not play by the rules

in that palmy place : : nor stand at lectern professing

anything at all

in their hire (21-24)

This passage shows how Rich separates her main occupation as a poet from her academic profession. Presumably her criticism towards universities has to do with their cloistral atmosphere, where, according to her, "anything at all" can be professed, in opposition to her verbal privilege of poet, in which she is publicly charged with what she wrote, as discussed in "North American Time."

The third section of the poem synthesizes the hopeful spirit of the book. The first stanza instigates the curiosity of the reader:

Had never expected hope would form itself

completely in my time : : was never so sanguine

as to believe old injuries could transmute easily

through any singular event or idea (1-4)

According to a class discussion in the course "Poesia Anglo-Americana 3308 - Rich, Bishop, and Simic: poetry, history and politics," the use of double colons allows a reverse effect from what Rich is communicating. In this sense, the passage above can be understood this way:

was never so sanguine

as to believe old injuries could transmute easily

through any singular event or idea : : Had never expected hope would form itself

completely in my time

Thus, the double colons confer the poem mobility, as if the list of hopeless events which justify why the speaker did not "expect hope" (1) in the past could come before her statement. For the Washington Post reviewer Aviya Kushner, the double colons are a technique to help readers to comprehend the "long, segmented poems" (1)

Kushner seems to be very attained to the journalistic text commitment to a rigid standard pattern of English and does not perceive that the lack of punctuation can be seen as a way of tearing the frontiers between poem and society. Although she had observed a positive point in the double colons, she was unable to conceive the poem as a flux of imagination not totally submitted to strict grammar rules.

The paired colons are part of Rich's efficient poetics in Midnight Salvage. In the third section of the title poem, they anticipate Rich's declaration of hope in the second and final stanza:

But thought I was conspiring, breathing-along

with history's systole-diastole

twenty thousand leagues under the sea a mammal heartbeat

sheltering another heartbeat

plunging from the Farallons all the way to Baja

sending up here or there a blowhole signal

and sometimes beached

making for warmer waters

where the new would be delivered : : though I would not see it (10-18)

At the end of the century, Adrienne Rich's hope is mediated by a whale or a dolphin, in a way that resembles her "animal poems" of the fifties when she was trying to find a distinct voice and used tigers and bears to conduct her poems towards a more woman-centered focus. In the later nineties, Rich seems to try the discovery of a voice that allows her to express her hopes. The marine mammal movement from "twenty thousand leagues under the sea" to "warmer waters," and from Farallons islands to Baja combined with its delivery, suggest a sense of natural harmony and continuity of life. As this happens with the so-called irrational animals, it is implied that our civilized culture can also find its harmony.

Considering the oceanic environment, it is important to contrast this poem to "Diving into the Wreck." In "Diving," there is solitude in the depth of the sea, as the speaker is in loco observing the wreck. In "Midnight Salvage," she imagines the scene, as if she could glimpse a hopeful future, symbolized in the marine mammal newborn after its long delivery travel. In WIFT, the essay "What if?" dialogues with this hope, discussing the main purpose of poetry for Adrienne Rich:

Through its refined lyricism, its marine images talking of a natural change, "Midnight Salvage" asks us about a possible "what if."

The seventh part of "Midnight Salvage" discusses with a slowness of movements and images resembling sickness how difficult it is for a committed poet to reach this stage of revolutionary poetry:

The second and final part of the poem sounds like an urge to write more poems, despite the difficulties presented:

The circularity of the poem, represented by the repetition of the expression "horrible patience" reinforces her promise of "submitting" (12) to poetry. Although this poem treats the poetic creation as derivative from sickness, it is expected that the poet, after having waited for the "horrible patience," can "relief her body and reconstruct her mind" through poetry.

Other poems in the collection continue assembling voices and appropriating literary and political documents in prose. In an interview with Paulo da Costa for the Portuguese electronic magazine CiberKiosk, Rich affirms: "Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single "I" or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own" (3). In the poem "Long Conversation," for instance, Rich seems to elaborate to the maximum this technique. Rich did not section this poem, perhaps for increasing the extension and interpenetration of its "conversations." Thus, along its seventeen pages, the poem gathers passages from William Blake, Coleridge, Karl Marx, Che Guevara, Richard Nixon and others less famous figures. On page 60, Rich summarizes this heteroglossia:

All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not, or even if you're

only

as we were trying

to keep an eye

on the weapons on the street

and under the street (1-6)

Her prose fragments demonstrate poetic force, as on page 64, where refers to some of her lyric ideas as the marine mammal in "Midnight Salvage:"

Despite these hopes (hers and her readers), Rich concentrates her life and work in a powerful statement "I am my art." Her art furnishes her a sense of ligament to her parents, at the same time it renews her sixties' oaths on commitment to her beliefs. In the later nineties, Rich still tries to translate pulsations, anger, and fear (sociopolitical matters) into images and language, which rotates "on an axle of love," lyricism, and poetry. On page 67, this poetry is the force that keeps her working: