Adrienne Rich, 1929 - 2012
The award-winning poet and essayist Adrienne Rich, who was one of America's most powerful writers, has died aged 82.Her daughter-in-law Diana Horowitz said Rich died at home in Santa Cruz, California, following complications from the rheumatoid arthritis from which she had suffered for many years.
Described as "one of America's foremost public intellectuals" by thePoetry Foundation, and as "a poet of towering reputation and towering rage [who] brought the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse and kept it there for nearly a half-century"by the New York Times, Rich's career spanned seven decades, numerous prizes and more than 20 collections of poetry as well as acclaimed essays, articles and lectures.
When she was just 21, WH Auden chose her as winner of the Yale Younger Poets Competition. Auden went on to write a preface for her first collection, A Change of World. "The typical danger for poets in our age is, perhaps, the desire to be 'original'," he wrote. "Miss Rich, who is, I understand, 21 years old, displays a modesty not so common with that age, which disclaims any extraordinary vision, and a love for her medium, a determination to ensure that whatever she writes shall, at least, not be shoddily made."
By the 60s and early 70s, however, with collections such as Diving into the Wreck and Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, Rich was writing radical free verse full of her feminist ideals and leftwing convictions, exploring sexuality and identity, motherhood and politics. Her transformation, said the critic Ruth Whitman in 2002, has been "astonishing to watch ... In one woman the history of women in the 20th century, from careful traditional obedience to cosmic awareness, defying the mode of our time."
1997: Why I refused the National Medal for the Arts
My "no" came directly out of my work as a poet and essayist and citizen drawn to the interfold of personal and public experience. I had recently been thinking and writing about the growing fragmentation of the social compact, of whatever it was this country had ever meant when it called itself a democracy: the shredding of the vision of government of the people, by the people, for the people. "We the people--still an excellent phrase," said the prize-winning playwright Lorraine Hansberry in 1962, well aware who had been excluded, yet believing the phrase might someday come to embrace us all. And I had for years been feeling both personal and public grief, fear, hunger and the need to render this, my time, in the language of my art.Whatever was "newsworthy" about my refusal was not about a single individual--not myself, not President Clinton. Nor was it about a single political party. Both major parties have displayed a crude affinity for the interests of corporate power while deserting the majority of the people, especially the most vulnerable. Like so many others, I've watched the dismantling of our public education, the steep rise in our incarceration rates, the demonization of our young black men, the accusations against our teenage mothers, the selling of health care--public and private--to the highest bidders, the export of subsistence-level jobs in the United States to even lower-wage countries, the use of below-minimum-wage prison labor to break strikes and raise profits, the scapegoating of immigrants, the denial of dignity and minimal security to our working and poor people. At the same time, we've witnessed the acquisition of publishing houses, once risk-taking conduits of creativity, by conglomerates driven single-mindedly to fast profits, the acquisition of major communications and media by those same interests, the sacrifice of the arts and public libraries in stripped-down school and civic budgets and, most recently, the evisceration of the National Endowment for the Arts. Piece by piece the democratic process has been losing ground to the accumulation of private wealth.
There is no political leadership in the White House or the Congress that has spoken to and for the people who, in a very real sense, have felt abandoned by their government.
1980: "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence"
1973: "Diving into the Wreck"
This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.
Wow.
Thanks so much for putting that together, Catchfire.
Glad you liked it, LTJ!
Dykes to watch out for cartoonist Alison Bechdel's tribute to Rich.
Great obit by Kaitlin McNabb, ex-rabble intern, book-club organizer and general renaissance woman:
Adrienne Rich: May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012
an excellent writer and superb poet. Sad to hear she's gone.
... okay, I'm going to explain what the problem is and then I'm going to stop wasting my time in such a ciscentric space:
http://yrwelcome.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/adrienne-rich-and-transmisogyn...
Adrienne Rich proctored Transsexual Empire, one of the most misogynistic tracts of the last half-century. She wasn't just in the same social circles as Janice Raymond, but rather, without her influence a book that set transition medicine back about 15 years, (and by Zoe Brain's estimate, caused about 60,000 preventable deaths) wouldn't have taken the shape it did. Adrienne Rich has the blood of women on her hands, and to see her tirelessly and uncomplicatedly feted by cis feminists who nod and smile when intersectionality comes up and then, as has just been shown, is then cast aside despite:
Adrienne Rich had 33 years to correct that statement if it was libel, she did not. Rather, she went on to continue the mutual transmisogynist's admiration society:http://yrwelcome.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/adrienne-rich-and-transmisogyny-we-can-begin-by-acknowledging-that-it-matters/#comment-416
Never mind that trans people, trans women especially, to this day, have our bodies policed legally in a manner that would make Judy Rebick blanch if it'd been proposed as a replacement for the 1968 abortion law. Never mind the complete lack of support from cis feminists other than the occasional person who remembers not to erase us, unless we're talking about reproductive rights, in which case women are reduced to uteri. Someone who worked to deny women medicine, just as surely as if they'd put a bullet in an endocrinologist's head, died, and all you can do is unreservedly praise her. I'm sticking around for the discussion but then I'm done.
You should all know better... especially you, Catchfire.
Thanks for that information, RTTG. I honestly had no idea about this. It's a lot to digest (as intersectionality issues often are, especially for folk with no lived experience of those intersecting oppression). I will try to educate myself with this new info in mind.
I admit I have a lot to learn about trans issues, and without your instructive interventions, that education will go the slower. I totally respect and understand the difficulty you must experience coming in here and having to explain some trans issue *again*, and I encourage you to look after yourself first (self-care is critical). But if you leave, you will be sorely missed.
Same here.
I appreciate the apology. Though honestly, these are women that these two have campaigned to morally mandate out of existence. Intersectionality be damned, even unidirectionalists should be outraged. The cause of my animus is that... I expect the experts to know better. I expect people who, like you, have rattled off theory as fact to be able to back it up and to be well prepared for the counter-arguments.
Here's a homework assignment: Find me an avowedly anti-cissexist cis feminist who's not been problematically cissexist/subversivist who was first published in the latter half of the 20th century. (sorry, you don't get to cheat and use Emma Goldman ^_^)
Also, someone else had a thought for me that finally articulated my response to an argument that gets trotted out every single time I try to combat this pernicious brand of masculocentrism:
In that we trans women don't. The choice is to play along and have society tell you that you're so disgusting that you're better off not existing, and half-heartedly praise the mask you carry, while still unconsciously viewing you through a masculocentric (or if you must use the adhominem version, femmephobic) lens and punishing you due to their implicit knowledge that you're not who they're making you pretend to be, or to put yourself through an indeterminate amount of hell by removing all doubt.
I hope cis women never have the trouble getting reproductive health care that I did, that they're never denied blood pressure medicine while hypertensive pending a psychiatric consultation. I hope that cis women never have not only to be devalued and derided and told to shut up in school but to have it done to them in a class (presumably) full of boys taught by a jock. I hope cis lesbians aren't called straight boys acting out a fantasy. That a cis woman who corrects vaginal prolapse isn't accused of maintaining a fuckhole for the patriarchy. I hope that when cis women are sexually assualted they're not ignored and laughed at and turned away from shelters and that those people that say that what they experience is simple misogyny on the same axis and of the same severity as trans women don't snort and minimize the rapes those women are victims of (heck, I hope that for everyone). Frankly, I hope that cis women go on having what we describe as cis privilege. I just hope trans women, and everyone generally, can get the same basket of basic human decency.
I am also, and I'm sorry for the drift, going to say this: Everytime I bring up an instance of a trans woman or trans women being oppressed, and post it the feminism thread, it gets utterly ignored.
With a prevalence of social transition at 1 in 200-300 and a prevalence of avowed transsexuality at 1%, and noting how those numbers have been consistently rising as we dismantle barriers to transition and identification. (For example, there are now states and provinces where admitting you fired a person just because they were trans is illegal, and now in Ontario a woman doesn't have to get her genitalia cut just to be recognized as a woman) And the three-fold rise in avowed non-heterosexuality over the last thirty years as being cis and GLBQ went from being about as legal as being trans is now to being more or less culturally integrated (Yes, yes, marriage in some states, states where the polling shows they would pass an inclusive ENDA in a statewide ballot, i.e. every state... talk to me when you can't rent a home, safely use a bus pass [in Philidelphia] or even a washroom), and never mind there being 37 million girls and women worldwide, there are likely at least a hundred million women who are simply ignored, denied agency over their own bodies on a fundamental level.
These are actual missing women, living lives of desperation, both quietly and loudly marginalized, but if she isn't CAFAB, well then, obviously she's some sad deluded subset of your oppressor, and not worthy of this board's concern. That may not be the intent, but after enough shouting at the rain, that's sure as hell what it feels like.
There's a great line that Julia Serano has about Michfest but it applies to women's space and women's organization generally, and the hegemony of cissexist and masculocentric ideas within those spaces:
I kinda miss she-who-will-not-be-named. At least she was open about her cissexist-misogyny, though she wouldn't call it that. And yeah, Cross-Product seems prescient on this too, when she mentions it's not just the right-wing who hates us, but the left wing too. I'm not going anywhere yet. I'm not some delicate little flower, but a functional, if wounded, person, just like the rest of us.
That said, you should take a run through of one of your favorite albums, I'd recommend The Indigo Girls, but they're transmisogynistic too (that was one of the most disappointing things to learn), and try to do that homework I assigned. Even an educator can't do all the work for you.