Adrienne Rich (1929–2012)

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/03/adrienne-rich.html

She was one of the first poets whose words made my heart falter.

While some of her politics are very different from my take, many years later, her essay from 1980 "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" had a very profound effect on me, since I read it as a student, just figuring out what it meant to be a woman and an adult in a culture that wanted to restrict my choices.

Rich became more moderate with time, but there are some powerful ideas in that piece, and even those I didn't agree with, made me think very hard about how I wanted to be.

Her poetry is incredible. "Diving into the Wreck" was the first thing of hers I read. You can find it here:

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15228

The world is a poorer place for her loss, but richer for her words.

Requiescat in pace Adrienne.

Here's another of hers that I love:


I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you've been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I've been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone...
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

Adrienne Rich from Twenty-One Love Poems.

Rich initially published these in a chapbook; they were commercially published in 1976.

Rich struggled with scars from the 1970s, in particular, and part of that was first the move towards separatism, and then, the rebound (and greater understanding) away from separatism. There was a definite element of loathing towards anything perceived as at all in any way "masculine" for many separatists then, and I'm afraid that colored everything, to the point where I can remember communes where male children were placed with relatives as soon as they were weaned.

I don't actually believe Raymond's thank you in her acknowledgement of a 1979 book means much of anything at all. 33 years is a long time—Raymond's attitude, and the quote she used from Rich was, frankly, and quite unfortunately, on the more thoughtful end of the spectrum for the era. I do think, based especially on various interviews and publications since then, that Rich got a little more clueful, and perceptive.

In 1979 it wasn't even a little uncommon for people to assert in mainstream and even academic publications that lesbians wanted to be men, and gay men wanted to be women . . . I know that makes no sense, but that kind of crap was in college psychology text books. It was perceived as absolutely true.

Imagine what idiotic assumptions would have been made about gender dysphoria, in that kind of a dyslogistic and crude environment.

Raymond is . . . non compos mentis is the kindest thing I can say. Certainly she is lacking in intellectual rigor. I think her transphobia is related to her misogyny. She makes even less sense now than she did then.

I'm sorry for the pain that she, and Rich, and others have caused. I know that doesn't help, but honestly gender is in our hearts and minds, not in this too too solid flesh.