DEDICATIONS
by Adrienne Rich
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a gray day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plain’s enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. 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 by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the Intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
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
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
Ben, what do you think is unique about Adrienne Rich’s work?
In her essays she is passionate and articulate and she carries you with her somehow. In her poetry it's the tenderness and the toughness playing with each other, and the fearlessness with which she evokes the tight rope between knowing and not knowing. Her work is vividly political and deeply erotic - and the best of it is both at the same time.
What was your first experience of her poetry?
Where does anything begin? I think we studied A Valediction Forbidding Mourning in Sixth Form, and I was intrigued by this poem which was had such a distinctive voice behind it but confused me at the level of meaning. The voice however intrigued me. A year or so later, I picked up the Margaret Reynolds Erotica anthology, a collection of women's writing. I got it second-hand on Sussex University campus, and in that I found Floating Poem, Unnumbered.
Again it was the voice that got me - the tenderness, the exquisite grasp of image, and the freedom within form to move and delight in equal measure. I went out and got a collection of her poems and haven't stopped reading her since. And her essays are as vital to me as her poems - the two forms complement each other.
On Monday, which poem will you open your celebratory evening with?
Dedications, which is a poem that moves through time and place to touch on the experience of a multitude of imagined readers. The voice in the poem repeateadly states "I know", but weaved through the lines is an uncertainty about ever adequately speaking for another person, ever embodying another. I chose to begin with this poem because it has a steadiness and a solidity but builds gorgeously and is full of voices.
A while ago you leant me Rich’s essay, 'Poetry and Commitment', and in that she refers to ‘voices mingling in a long conversation, a long turbulence,’ the tradition of radical modernism, the work of ‘those who have written against the silences of their time and location’, without which ‘our world is unintelligible.’ Does this mean poetry has a political power? How does that happen in Rich's work?
I have a feeling that often Rich is writing through the voice of characters who are other than her in order to excavate and expose notions and assumptions of otherness. And this process of embodying the other feels ethical and valid to me as a way of undoing all the constant othering which capitalism uses to promote and reinforce fear, perhaps.
Yes, if we say 'I don't know who's receiving this, and if I think I know, what if I think about any other reader or listener or audience it might be...' She says in Dedications, I want to know what you don't understand.
Who gets to write poetry, who gets to read it, the canon, received formal notions, subject matter, verbal privilege – all of that's political, isn't it? And it's all weaved right through the 60-odd years of poetry that Rich has produced so far, because she's always engaged with the social contract - who we are to each other. For me, as I've worked on curating this performance of her work, I've been provoked into thinking a lot about the relationship between the personal and political, and a realisation, which I think Rich would share, that they're not separate at all. 'The personal is the political' feels like a somewhat old-fashioned sentiment and at the same time more urgent than ever. There's a bit of Rich which I love where she says:
The moment when a feeling enters the body
is political. This touch is political.
I love that touch.
Is pleasure a part of your enjoyment of her work?
There is a pleasure for me in her language and her rhythms, and a pleasure in the really thorough excavation of themes - often facing things for what they are, with flashes of surprising beauty. So yes pleasure is a big part of the experience for me. Pleasure and a different way of thinking.
WE ARE DRIVEN TO ODD ATTEMPTS
By Adrienne Rich
We are driven to odd attempts; once it would not have occurred to me to put out in a boat, not on a night like this.
Still, it was an instrument, and I had pledged myself to try any instrument that came my way. Never to refuse one from conviction of incompetence.
A long time I was simply learning to handle the skiff; I had no special training and my own training was against me.
I had always heard that darkness and water were a threat.
In spite of this, darkness and water helped me to arrive here.
I watched the lights on the shore I had left for a long time; each one, it seemed to me, was a light I might have lit, in the old day.
Something To Hold Onto, a celebration of the work of Adrienne Rich, is on Monday 28th November at the Ovalhouse theatre.
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