SPEAKER_01: We are, I am, you are, by cowardice or courage, the one who find our way back to the scene, carrying a knife, a camera, a book of myths, in which our names do not appear. Hello! From Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, and this is Encyclopedia Wamanica.
SPEAKER_00: Today we're talking about one of the most widely taught, widely read, and widely praised poets of the 20th century. Her work brought the minutiae of women's lives into the spotlight, challenging the idea that to write from the female perspective was uninspired and undeserving of attention. Let's talk about Adrienne Rich. When she was born in Baltimore in 1929, Adrienne Rich's parents thought she would be a boy. They'd planned to name her after her father, Arnold, a doctor. Instead, Arnold decided his daughter, Adrienne, would be a literary prodigy. By the age of four, Adrienne could read and write. By six, she wrote her first poetry book. By seven, a 50-page play about the Trojan War. This is the child we needed and deserved, her mother Helen wrote in a notebook. Helen had been a concert pianist and had given up her career for marriage and motherhood. As much as Adrienne's childhood was marked by long hours in her father's library, her mother's sadness and lack of agency left a lasting impression, too. In 1951, while a senior at Radcliffe College, Adrienne experienced her first big break. Her poetry manuscript, A Change of World, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. The prize came with a publishing contract. W. H. Auden wrote The Forward, and reviewers loved it. At 22 years old, Adrienne became a critical darling. Soon thereafter, she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, which funded additional studies at Oxford. There, she met Alfred Conrad, a graduate student from Harvard. Despite her father's disapproval, Adrienne married Alfred in 1953. By the time Adrienne was 30 years old, she was the mother of three young boys. The family moved around, following Alfred from teaching job to teaching job. Adrienne's days were filled with household chores, including laundry, cooking, and cleaning, with little time for poetry. She felt increasingly separated from the prodigy she'd once been. Years later, she wrote that this period of her life felt like sleepwalking. In the first nine years of her marriage, Adrienne only published one book, The Diamond Cutters. But in 1963 came her third collection, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. In the title poem, Adrienne found the creative footing that would carry her through the rest of her career. The piece opens with housework, with a woman doing dishes, her mother-in-law nearby. But Adrienne finds metaphor and meaning in the mundane lives of these two women. She proves it's an area deserving of art, a place to be both explored and transcended. The poem reads, You, once at Belle and Shreveport, with henna-colored hair, skin like a peach bud, still have your dresses copied from that time. Your mind now, moldering like a wedding cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumor, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife edge of mere fact, in the prime of your life. Nervy, glowering, your daughter wipes the teaspoons, grows another way. Later Adrienne wrote that motherhood radicalized her. In 1973 Adrienne published what would become regarded as her masterwork, the poetry collection Diving into the Wreck. The collection won the National Book Award, but Adrienne refused to accept it alone. Instead, she invited fellow nominees Audre Lorde and Alice Walker to collectively receive the award on behalf of all women. In 1976 Adrienne officially came out as a lesbian with the poetry collection 21 Love Poems. The subject? Queer love. That year she moved in with her partner Michelle Cliff. They would remain together until Adrienne's death more than 30 years later.
SPEAKER_01: What kind of beast would turn its life into words? What atonement is this all about? And yet writing words like these I'm also living. Is all this close to the wolverine's howl signals, that modulated cantata of the wild? Or when away from you I try to create you in words? Am I simply using you like a river or a war?
SPEAKER_00: Adrienne would ultimately publish 24 collections of poetry and more than half a dozen books of essays and prose. She explored identity politics before the discipline had a name. She wrote about the violent whiteness of the feminist movement, of racism, anti-blackness, and of the male hegemony. She wrote about the lasting effects of the Holocaust, of reclaiming her Judaism, and she wrote about the burden of traditional femininity and the institution of motherhood. In 1997 Adrienne refused the National Medal of Arts, the highest artistic honor awarded by the US government. In a letter she wrote that she couldn't understand how amid the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic justice, the country chose to honor a few token artists while the people at large are so dishonored. She further wrote, art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage. Adrienne died in 2012 due to complications from rheumatoid arthritis. In a 1984 speech she summed up her lifelong fight in seven words. The creation of a society without domination. All of this year, the world's most important thing, the world's most important thing, is the creation of a society without domination. In the next month, we're celebrating Pride. For more on why we're doing what we're doing, check out our newsletter, Womanica Weekly. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram
SPEAKER_05: at Encyclopedia Womanica. Special thanks to Liz Kaplan, my favorite sister and co-creator. Talk to you tomorrow. At T-Mobile. Now, with T-Mobile's best Go 5G plans, upgrade when you want. Every year, or every two, you decide. Visit T-Mobile.com to take charge of your upgrades.
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