Originally published by L.S. Media. March 30th 2012.
The worlds of poetry and feminist writing were in mourning this week as the news broke that that one of the finest and most deeply interesting poets of her generation, Adrienne Cecile Rich, had passed on at the age of 82.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland on May 16th 1929, the American poet and essayist became one of the most widely read and influential poets of the 20th century and was credited with bringing “the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse.”
Her interest in literature was sparked from within her father’s library where she was a keen reader of Ibsen, Arnold, Blake, Keats, Rossetti and Tennyson. Her father was an ambitious man who “planned to create a prodigy”. The Professor of Medicine at John Hopkins Medical School forced the young Adrienne Rich to write a poem every day which she would then have to present to her father when he came home. She would do this act grudgingly and, although she later accepted that it was a good grounding in what she aspired to do, she said of renowned pathologist Arnold Rice Rich that “his involvement was egotistical, tyrannical and terribly wearing”. She also found it hard to bare that much of her father’s library, though it was extensive and had many volumes of poetry within it, was all written by men.
In 1953 she married Alfred Haskell Conrad, a Professor of Economics at Harvard; the couple had three sons whom she adored. The marriage began to tear apart when the couple separated in 1970 after many years of Alfred fearing his wife was losing her mind after hosting anti-war and Black Panther fundraising parties at their apartment. Shortly afterwards Conrad drove into the woods and shot himself.
In 1976 Adrienne Rich began her lifelong relationship with Jamaican-born novelist Michelle Cliff.
Perhaps one of her finest and critical works was the 1976 publication Of Woman Born, a non-fiction prose examination of the ordeal of motherhood. She reflects on her love for her children and the effect it has on other emotions and also explores how motherhood, once revered in society, changed as the world became more patriarchal. She also made popular the term “compulsory heterosexuality” in her 1980 essay Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence in which she asserted that “women can benefit more from relationships with other women than they can with men.”
In 1997, she declined the National Medal of Arts in protesting against the House of Representatives vote to end the National Endowment for the Arts and other policies of the then Clinton Administration. She stated later that, “I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because of the very meaning of art, as I understand it , is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration… [art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which it holds it hostage.”
Adrienne Rich died March 27th 2012 in Santa Cruz, California of complications from long-term rheumatoid arthritis. She is survived by Michelle Cliff and her sons.
Ian D. Hall