Friday, March 30, 2012

Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)

 
The Poetry Box honors the life of poet Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), who so eloquently dedicated her life and work to justice, love, and beauty. Upon learning of Rich’s death on March 28, Stegner Fellow David Biespiel called Rich, “The greatest American political poet since Walt Whitman.”

Rich was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1997, but she declined to accept, 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...[Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.”



POWER

Living            in the earth-deposits     of our history
Today a backhoe divulged     out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle     amber     perfect     a hundred-year-old
cure for fever    or melancholy     a tonic
for living on this earth     in the winters of this climate

Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered     from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years    by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin     of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold     a test-tube or a pencil

She died     a famous woman      denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds     came     from the same source as her power,

-Adrienne Rich, 1974