Poetry and Commitment

by Adrienne Rich, Mark Doty (Afterword)

In the traditional of great literary manifestos, Norton is proud to present this powerful work by Adrienne Rich. With passion, critical questioning, and humor, Adrienne Rich suggests how poetry has actually been lived in the world, past and present. In this essay, which was the basis for her speech upon accepting the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, she ranges among themes including poetry's disparagement as "either immoral or unprofitable," the politics of translation, how poetry enters into extreme situations, different poetries as conversations across place and time. In its openness to many voices, Poetry and Commitment offers a perspective on poetry in an ever more divided and violent world.

"I hope never to idealize poetry―it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard."

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Essays, United States

64 pages, Paperback

First published April 2, 2007

About the author

Works, notably Diving into the Wreck (1973), of American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich champion such causes as pacifism, feminism, and civil rights for gays and lesbians.

A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.

In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation in such works as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971). In Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), she continued to experiment with form and to deal with the experiences and aspirations of women from a feminist perspective.

In addition to her poetry, Rich has published many essays on poetry, feminism, motherhood, and lesbianism. Her recent collections include An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995 (1995).

Reviews

[Matthew Hittinger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked this up in City Lights over the weekend and read it on the plane home today. This passage stuck with me:

"I hope never to idealize poetry--it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong."

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A powerful manifesto on how all poetry is political and (even that which is consciously trying to be apolitical). This is essentially an awards speech but one only Rich could have credibly delivered.

[joanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting essay about poetry being political.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I want to nod and say "yes" to everything Rich says here, especially her examples of poets who've demonstrated clear political commitment and of people who have been politically transformed by poetry. But part of me is always critical, wanting to complicate the questions about what it means to be a dissident poet in the U.S. and about the relationship between aesthetics and violence. Rich hints at these complexities, but, perhaps because the book is derived from a speech, she doesn't really take the time to develop them.

Still, I'll almost certainly use this in poetry classes to help open up those questions. Sections I'll likely return to:

p. 14: Quoting James Scully's distinction between protest poetry ("'conceptually shallow,' 'reactive,' predictable in its means, too often a handwringing from the sidelines") and dissident poetry, which "'does not respect boundaries between private and public, self and other. In breaking boundaries, it breaks silences, speaking for, or at best, with the silenced; opening poetry up, putting it into the middle of life ... It is a poetry that talks back, that would act as part of the world, not simply as a mirror of it.'"

p. 17: "We often hear that--by contrast with, say, Nigeria or Egypt, China or the former Soviet Union--the West doesn't imprison dissident writers. But when a nation's criminal justice system imprisons so many--often on tawdry evidence and botched due process--to be tortured in maximum security units or on death row, overwhelmingly because of color and class, it is in effect--and intention--silencing potential and actual writers, intellectuals, artists, journalists: a whole intelligentsia."

p. 25: "If to 'aestheticize' is to glide across brutality and cruelty, treat them merely as dramatic occasions for the artist rather than structures of power to be revealed and dismantled--much hangs on the words 'merely' and 'rather than.' Opportunism isn't the same as committed attention. But we can also define the 'aesthetic' not as a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering, but as news of an awareness, of resistance, that totalizing systems want to quell: art reaching into us for what's still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched."

[Jennifer Collins · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adrienne Rich is one of my favorite poets, and was one of the first whose writing helped me understand how poetry could be built to make a distinct and socially engaged difference in the world. Without exception, I find such power in her collections that I read them more than once, and share them with my students and read them all over again.

And yet, I have to admit, I was disappointed by this short work. It was far more academic than I would have expected, and at times it barely seemed to have been written by a poet so much as a critic. Mark Doty's Afterword, for me, was actually more striking than many of the short chapters in the work, as much as I love Rich's poetry.

So, would I recommend it? Honestly, I'm not sure that I could, though I'd certainly recommend that any writer or reader search out her poetry.

[Aubrey Byron · Rating 4 out of 5]

A brief little exploration of the philosophy of poetry and its modern importance. It felt mostly as if Rich were defending poetry against technology and capitalism, which it could be argued that to tell it to a fan of hers is to preach to the choir. Her argument does ring true when the comparison is made between the fragility of politics in the world today and the solid historical foundation of poetry and its roots in society. Quick, succinct, and worth the read.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a gift from a dear friend who knows I adore Adrienne Rich. In the slim book, Rich affirms dissident poetry and questions those who claim that politics have no place in poetry. She sees poetry as an active agent in the world, not a piece of art on a wall or a tonic, meant only to soothe.

An important meditation on the work and beauty of poetry.

[Barbara · Rating 3 out of 5]

While this book can be read as inspiring to American poets who believe in their own power to write political poetry, I remain unconvinced about Rich's empathy for the dispossessed of the world. I am equally as unconvinced by Mark Doty's Afterword regarding Rich's empathy.

[Paula · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I largely agree with Rich, that poetry is politics while simultaneously not a how-to guide, I think that in this essay she relied too much on other poets' words than her own, which caused her reasoning to be fragmented and meandering.

[John Hyland · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting and useful alternative to the kind of modernism that often gets mobilized (e.g. Notes on Conceptualisms). But I am at times uncomfortable with Rich's invocation of the subaltern as a way to mobilize that alternative.

[Russ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Adrienne Rich explores what makes poetry last.In short form she explores what it takes to make poetry that appeals and challeges the mind as well.

[Amandaklonsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really a manifesto for those of us who care to make our art work and writing serve the mission of justice. Inspiring and beautiful.

[Corinne Blackmer · Rating 5 out of 5]

read

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

An essay/speech arguing for a poetics, in place of the formulae of false problems, that is "searching for transformative meaning on the shoreline of what can now be thought or said."

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Small, beautiful.

[Sally · Rating 4 out of 5]

A speech given by A.R.

I read it in college, and I discovered many of my new favorite poets here.

[Ray Osborn · Rating 4 out of 5]

ethics of poetry; one of my favorite topics. the book is very well organized and presents most of the same questions i wrangle with daily.

[Daphne · Rating 4 out of 5]

re-reading it now that I'm a little older, a little wiser, and therefore appreciate it a little better

[Wade · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow. yes. brilliant. i can't say much more. read it for yourself!