Leaflets

by Adrienne Rich

The themes of this book are the poetics of violence and the poetics of love. Its impulse is the deepening of recognitions through language, in a time of ignorance and mutilation.


Ms. Rich has written: "For a poet...there is this primary labor with words. But I have the notion that how you live your life has something to do with it—that morality, for a poet, is a refusal of blinders, of traditional consolations, a courage to be alone, or wounded....A willingness to step out into the fog, to take paths which may lead nowhere. Certainty, predictability, are the first supports that have to go. I see the poetry of things as standing in resistance to brute mechanistic force, the charge of the rhinoceros with its head down. To discover—literally—this poetry and re-create it in language is a poet's essential action."

Genres: Poetry, American

80 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1969

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

[Julie Ehlers · Rating 5 out of 5]

O God I am not spiritless,
but a spirit can be stunned,
a battery felt going dead

before the light flickers,
and I've covered this ground too often
with this yellow disc

within whose beam all's commonplace,
and whose limits are described
by the whole night.

Reading Leaflets was such a different experience from reading the two Adrienne Rich collections that preceded it. Those two, Necessities of Life and Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, were uneven and felt like the work of a poet at loose ends, and their odd lack of focus was mirrored by my own inability to train my focus on them for any significant length of time. Leaflets, on the other hand, I didn't want to stop reading—it had a sadness that just pulled me in and wouldn't let me go. The poems felt very personal and as raw as Adrienne Rich ever gets, but by the end there was some anger and some definite political stirrings. She's looking for something better here: a better, more honest life for herself, and a better, more honest world. It's likely no coincidence her next collection is called The Will to Change.

[Magali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Those poems were full of anger, or at least I read them like that, and it was amazing. It felt like a liberation to read them.

[Myhte · Rating 4 out of 5]

What else does it come down to
but handing on scraps of paper

Calmly you ache up there
pinned aloft in your crow’s nest,
my speechless pirate!

The strain of being born
over and over has torn your smile into pieces
Often I have seen it broken
and then re-membered
and wondered how a beauty
so anarch, so ungelded
will be cared for in this world.
I want to hand you this
leaflet streaming with rain or tears

Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon
out here in the cold with you
you with your back to the wall.

The city has changed hands;
the plan you gave it, fallen through.

Obey the little laws and break the great ones
is the preamble to their constitution.

Even to hope is to leap into the unknown,
under the mocking eyes of the way things are.

I need to live each day through, have them and know them all,
though I can see from here where I’ll be standing at the end.

In the never, still arriving, I find you
again: blue absence keeps knowledge alive

I ache, brilliantly.

We are our words.

When it’s finished and we’re lying
in a stubble of blistered flowers
eyes gaping, mouths staring
dusted with crushed arterial blues
I’ll have done nothing
even for you?

Yet something wants us delivered up
alive, whatever it is,

On my knees, in the ashes, I could never
fit these ripped-up flakes together.

What breaks is night
not day The white
scar splitting
over the east
The crack weeping
Time for the pieces
to move
dumbly back
toward each other.

I want this to be yours
in the sense that if you find and read it
it will be there in you already
and the leaflet then merely something
to leave behind

[Blue Burke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adrienne Rich's poetry is haunting and profound. "Leaflets" is an excellent three part collection that includes translations and poems in the vein of a traditional Middle Eastern poetic form, ghazal--my favorite of the collection. Her poems about New York City appeal to my nostalgia of an older NY, one I will never know but mourn for.

[Isabelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of Rich’s best work. These are much more abstract than her famous poems, and I actually tend to favor more direct language, but I loved these.

[Craig Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not going to replace my previous review, but I do want to add a few reflections in response to re-reading Leaflets in the context of Rich's Collected Poems.

I'll start with the original review:

Fierce, honest, and as necessary today as it was in 1968. Paying ironic homage to Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Rich declared artistic, political and psychological independence from the traditions that had shaped her early life and work. Like Godard, Baldwin, Bob Dylan and Gary Snyder, she's determined to see the world clear, to reject the cant and evasions of the moment. You can see Rich moving towards the lesbian-feminist commitments of Diving Into the Wreck in poems like "Orion", but the heart of this book is the sequence of ghazals, a form she adapted from the Urdu poet Ghalib. The form is designed to end-run rational structure and allow meanings to emerge from the juxtaposition of couplets. No one's ever handled it better in English. I hadn't reread the book in a long time--probably since I was writing my book on Rich's early and mid-career--but what struck me most deeply is that the (as yet incomplete) success of feminism and the even more ambiguous success of the movements for racial justice have done nothing to diminish the fundamental fact that human life and awareness are under seige from forces that see people as products, consumers rather than possessors of consciousness and (a word Rich wouldn't use) soul.

Added comments:

As a dispatch from the later years of what Rich calls "the half-dark 'sixties'" ("In the Evening"), there's very little that matches Leaflets. Too clear-sighted to embrace any romantic notion of revolution, Rich nonetheless feels the complex power of Dylan's call in "Absolutely Sweet Marie": "to live outside the law you must be honest." In the Ghazal from 7/17/69, she writes "To live outside the law! Or, barely within it,/ a twig on boiling waters, enclosed inside a bubble" and in the Ghazal from 8/8/68, she writes: "Obey the little laws and break the great ones/ is the preamble to their constitution./ Even to hope is to leap into the unknown/ under the mocking eyes of the way things are." (Fast forward to 2017--anything there might be of use today?) She understands clearly that it's not a moment for clarity: "If these are letters, they will have to be misread./ If scrubbings on a wall, they must tangle with all the others" (Ghazal, 8/4/68). Rich's evolving sense of sexuality is present, but not yet as central as it would become: "I'd like to be gay. How could a gay song go?/ Why that's your secret, and it shall be mine," she muses, before acknowledging the in-betweens of the time: "This is a seasick way,/ this almost/never touching, this/drawing-off, this to-and-fro" ("The Demon Lover"). For the first time, the fox emerges as a kind of totem figure in "5:30 a.m." and "Abnegation." She will return frequently, like a recurring dream image. The project of deconstructing and reconstruction a useful tradition begun in "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" continues in her engagement with Gorbanevskaya, Akhmatova and Walt Whitman.

Leaflets is a book about the tension between silence, which as Rich would write in the essays collected in "On Lies, Secrets and Silence" can be either destructive or protective, and an as-yet-undiscovered mode of expression: "To mutilate privacy with a single foolish syllable/is to throw away the search for the one necessary word." (Ghazal 7/12/68, the first in the Ghalib sequence).

It's difficult for me to take any of the poems out of context, but for a sampling, read "Orion," "In the Evening," "The Demon Lover," "For a Russian Poet," "On Edges," "Violence," the title sequence and the Ghazals beginning "When your sperm enters me, it is altered," "Last night you wrote on the wall, Revolution is poetry," and "If these are letters, they will have to be misread," along with the 1969 poem "Tear Gas," which wasn't included in either Leaflets or The Will to Change."

[Michael Vagnetti · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will recall this book because of its poems of insomnia and early mornings, but I will also forget them for the same reason: these are not subjects from which I can hatch a plot with the author. They are states. They pass. I expected a more viscous, deployed activism, considering the dates of composition (1965-1968). Here, the "fight" has not been absorbed into the reflexes and musculature of the poems. When it is, it tends to be too direct or explicit, when it should be more immanent in the writing's fibers. It's the difference between talking about leading, and leading. Thus: "I was trying to drive a tradition up against the wall," or "I am thinking how we can use what we have/to invent what we need."

There is also an (over)focus on "image-making" rather than demonstrating a changed mind, and trying to infect the reader with it. Vision as lenscraft, rather than weaponized phasers. I am trying to find specifically why so many of these poems will not be memorable: too arbitrary, too allusive, too heroic, too personal. Phrases are too scattered, diffuse: "a stubble of blistered flowers" (?) The poems read more of a practice in calibration, rather than a demonstration of ballistics.

In the book's second section, however, there are the first samples of Rich's "fractured verse," spacing out words and phrases throughout a line. The final section is a series of sets of five couplets, inspired by ancient ghazals. They are dated July 1968. Formally they are a failure, lacking the rhyming and repetition that make a ghazal songlike, unique.

[Michael P. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ms. Rich was unconscionably rude to me and a coworker many years ago, and unrepentant about the incident. Basically, fuck her. Nevertheless, I have attempted to evaluate these poems fairly.

To be fair, therefore, I can see the power in a few of them and in portions of others, but it is not a power that especially resonates with me. There is a rebellion, even a call to revolution that ought to be seen as bold and interesting, but it is not a revolution that engages me. There are a few poems about her feelings, and you would think those would be accessible, but no. She surrounds those feelings with lines that alienate. Perhaps this alienation is a poetic device that I ought to value, but it just made me glad to move to the next poem. In sum, several poems got in my vicinity, but none of them reached me.

And I still say, Fuck this jerk!

[Ash · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adrienne Rich is one of those writers with whom I don't always agree (she was a fairly ardent separatist for much of her career, and I'm...not), but whose writing is gorgeous enough that I almost don't care.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is it--my favorite volume of Adrienne Rich's poetry.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

One badass old lady.

[Miami University Libraries]

King Library (2nd floor) | PS3535.I233 L4