Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich (born May 16, 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American feminist, poet, teacher, and writer.
Life
Rich was born 19 May 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland, the elder of two daughters of Arnold Rich, a doctor and pathology professor at Johns Hopkins University, and Helen Jones Rich, a gifted pianist and composer who had given up a possible professional musical career to raise a family.
In 1951, Rich graduated from Radcliffe College, and also won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition for her first book, A Change of World. W. H. Auden, the judge of the award, wrote a preface for the book that acquired eventual notoriety for its classic tones of male condescension and paternalism to female artists. In 1953, Rich married Alfred Conrad, a Harvard economist, and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she bore three sons in the next five years. Rich's third book Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), which was eight years in the writing, stands as a watershed in her poetic development. The critical reaction to Snapshots was negative, with objections to its bitter tone and the shift away from her hallmarks of formalism and emotional control.
Rich moved to New York in 1966, when her husband took a teaching position at City College. She taught in the SEEK program, a remedial English program for poor, black, and third world students entering college, which was raising highly political questions about the collision of cultural codes of expression and the relation of language to power, issues that have consistently been addressed in Rich's work. She was also strongly impressed during this time by the work of James Baldwin and Simone de Beauvoir. Though Rich and her husband were both involved in movements for social justice, it was to the women's movement that Rich gave her strongest allegiance. Leaflets (1969), The Will to Change (1971), and Diving into the Wreck (1973), which won the 1974 National Book Award, demonstrated a progressive coming to power as Rich contends against the desolation patriarchy enacts on the literal and psychic landscape.
Career
Over the years, Rich has taught at Swarthmore, Columbia, Brandeis, Rutgers, Cornell, San Jose State and Stanford University. Since 1976, she has lived with the writer and editor Michelle Cliff. She is active in movements for gay and lesbian rights, reproductive freedom, and for the progressive Jewish movement New Jewish Agenda. In 1981, she received the Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay Task Force. Her poetry has been honored with two Guggenheim Fellowships, the first Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Brandeis Creative Arts Medal, the Common Wealth Award, the William Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement, the National Poetry Association Award for Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Lannan Foundation, and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
Rich refused the National Medal for the Arts in 1997 saying, "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration." In February of 2003, Rich, along with other poets, in protest of the Iraq War, refused to attend a White House symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice." [1] It was announced on March 18, 2005 that Rich had won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for School Among the Ruins.
Bibliography
- A Change of World (Yale UP, 1951)
- The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (Harper, 1955)
- Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems, 1954-1962 (Harper, 1963)
- Necessities of Life (Norton, 1966)
- Leaflets: Poems, 1965-1968 (Norton, 1969)
- The Will to Change: Poems, 1968-1970 (Norton, 1971)
- Diving Into the Wreck: Poems, 1971-1972 (Norton, 1973) (including Rape)
- Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974 (Norton, 1974)
- Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Norton, 1976)
- Twenty-One Love Poems (Effie's Press, 1977)
- The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977 (Norton, 1978)
- On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (Norton, 1979)
- A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems, 1978-1981 (Norton, 1981)
- Sources (Heyeck Press, 1983)
- The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984 (Norton, 1984)
- Your Native Land, Your Life (Norton, 1986)
- Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1986 (Norton, 1986)
- Time's Power: Poems, 1985-1988 (Norton, 1988)
- An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems, 1988-1991 (Norton, 1991)
- Collected Early Poems, 1950-1970 (Norton, 1993)
- What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Norton, 1993)
- Dark Fields of the Republic, 1991-1995 (Norton, 1995)
- Voices, translated from the Spanish of Antonio Porchia (Copper Canyon Press, 2003)
- Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998 (1999)
- Fox: Poems 1998-2000 (Norton 2001)
- The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 (W.W. Norton & Co., 2004),