The School Among the Ruins

by Adrienne Rich

"Trust Rich, a clarion poet of conscience, to get the fractured timbre of the times just right."-- Booklist , starred review In this new collection Adrienne Rich confronts dislocations and upheavals in the United States at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The title poem, in a young schoolteacher's voice, evokes the lessons that children ("Not of course here") learn amid violence and hatred, "when the whole town flinches / blood on the undersole thickening to glass." "Usonian Journals 2000" intercuts faces and conversations, building to a dystopic/utopic vision. Throughout these fierce and musical poems, Rich traces the imprint of a public crisis on individual experience: personal lives bent by collective realities, language itself held to account.

Genres: Poetry, Feminism, Nonfiction, American, Literature

116 pages, Paperback

First published January 9, 2004

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]

This feels so relevant, it could have been written yesterday.

[Craig Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

The School Among the Ruins joints An Atlas of the Difficult World as the major (re)discoveries of my reading of Rich's Collected Poems. It's interesting and instructive how much my response to specific volumes has changed since my initial encounters. After the struggles--constructive and necessary--of Midnight Salvage and Fox, which resulted in some very dense, difficult pieces, Rich began the new century with a hard-won clarity. She's feeling the weight of history, the crush of the "cold story/ feeling it trying to feel it through" ("Tell Me"). She experiences a "civic nausea" ("Address"), an infected culture/nation content to ignore the "damage to others crushing of the animate core" ("Equinox"). In the essayistic sequence "Usonian Journals," she phrase the key question of how to respond to a world in which "fog blanks echoes, blots reciprocal sounds." Is it, she asks, ""the padded cell of a moribund democracy, or just your individual case?"

In spite of it, in the face of it, she recommits to connection, envisioning a kind of underground chorus: "one syllable then another/ gropes upward/ one stroke laid on another/ sound from one throat then another" ("Tell Me"). Throughout the 90s, she'd assumed a series of what poet (and Rich's friend) Ed Pavlic has called "fugitive" stances, explorations of "solitude" as protective withdrawal and/or a staging ground for reengagements yet to be clearly envisioned: "A map inscribes relation/ only when/ underground aquifers are fathomed in," creating a jazz chorus: "music from a basement session overheard" ("After Apollinaire & Brassens."

Many of the poems in The School Among the Ruins reward close attention, but here's the starter kit: the title poem, the Usonian Journals, "Equinox," "Tell Me," "Address," "Transparencies," "Collaborations," "Memorize This," "Slashes," and "Dislocations: Seven Scenarios," especially section 3.

[Kirsty · Rating 4 out of 5]

The School Among the Ruins is a collection which gathers together the poetry which Adrienne Rich wrote between 2000 and 2004. It is split into eight sections. I greatly admire the interesting uses which Rich makes of vocabulary. Her poetry here is fierce and direct, strong, and poignant.

From 'This Evening Let's':
'Too many reasons not
to waste a rainy evening'

From 'Livresque':
'There hangs a space between the man
and his words

like the space around a few snowflakes
just languidly beginning.'

From 'Livresque':
'writing agape, agape, with a silver fountain pen'

From 'Point in Time':
'This is the point in time when
she must re-condense her purpose
like ink, like rain, like winter light'

From 'Memorize This':
'Night melts one body into another'

From 'After Apollinaire & Brassens':
'when the Bridge of Arts trembles
under the streaked sky
when words of the poets tumble
into the shuddering stream
where who knew what joy
would leap after what pain'

[Jon Drucker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Holy shit. Any time you decide to read Adrienne Rich you are committing to the very likelihood that you are about to have your ass kicked in ways you had not suspected to exist. She will cut you. You will thank her. Then, much later, you'll just Get It and curse her and curse language for existing and then go back to thanking her. You're welcome. That's why we have poets. Someone has to kick us in the ass.

[Hannah Ringler · Rating 4 out of 5]

The School Among The Ruins is one of Rich’s later works - her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was published in 1951 - and is unabashedly political. By political I don’t mean just that it deals with the governmental policy, action, and inaction - though it does - but also that it discusses contemporary concerns in a voice personal and impersonal by turns but always passionate. The titular poem was particularly interesting, and I liked a quote of hers that I found discussing how difficult it was to avoid sentimentality in this poem; it isn’t a sentimental poem at all, but it so easily could be. She has a delicate hand with language and particularly uses understatement to great effect, though I think it’s the slantwise concreteness of her imagery that really makes this poem unsettling. Imagine photography in which we never see an entire scene but instead only shards of scenes here and there, seen through doorways and pipes, from above and below, but never straight on.

This can be a problem, actually, reading Rich. While this collection in particular avoids overcomplexity, some of her poetry is unnecessarily oblique to the point that without a few footnotes most of the meaning is lost. It tends to reward contemplation - Planetarium for example reveals more with every reading and is besides extremely satisfying to read aloud, particularly the resounding final segment - but isn’t always accessible, which can definitely be a major turn-off. For me, the poems in between obscurity and transparency read best, easy enough to appreciate on a quick read-through but with more meat to them on a reread.

One thing Rich does that really works for me is use white space for rhythm. She widens spaces between words, constricts them between others, adds indents to lines and sometimes within lines. These are not typographical errors. Read them out loud, see how your speech falters on those empty spaces, and see how the falters inform your understanding of the poem and the topic. I’ve seen white space used quite a bit before from other poets, but it’s mainly been tossing the lines from side to side. While this is effective enough, Rich refines the technique to great effect.

If you want to get some of her earlier work, and if you like poetry at all you probably do, then the collection The Fact of a Doorframe is a good choice. It’s a collection of poems from 1950~2001, and so what’s in The School Among The Ruins is not included in this collection, but it does contain a number of poems from her award-winning collection Diving Into The Wreck as well as Planetarium. It also offers an opportunity to trace her ideas over time, which can be useful when trying to tease out the meaning in some of her more obscure poems.

tl;dr - great collection of political poetry from the turn of the century, featuring truly excellent technical skill and unsettling, evocative imagery. If you are triggered by war imagery, this collection is probably not for you. Instead, read Diving Into the Wreck or The Fact of a Doorframe.

[Lisa M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

What can I say? I love Adrienne Rich. She has an amazing control of form and word choice. She is able to write poetry about politics and identity without taking the art out of it. This collection was particularly good. I'm not the poet Rich was, so I'm not sure what words to choose. Not all of Rich's poems are spectacular, but they're all solid. But the poems that are spectacular ... they're like a slap to the face. They're intense, they're real, they show universal humanity the way poems should. The more Rich I read, the more convinced I am that she was the poet of this century. Seriously, read Rich!

My only complaint about this collection is the notes. I really hate having to monitor whether each poem had it's own notes. The actual poems didn't indicate this in any way (and it often got confusing because she italicized quotes that would connect to a note, but there were other italicized portions that didn't connect to a note.) I'm not sure how I would indicate the notes without distracting from the poetry, but I don't appreciate the extra bit of work. Otherwise good stuff.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

HER POLITICAL POEMS. HER LOVE POEMS. ALL OF THESE POEMS. Oh god. Best read in conjunction with an AP Government & Politics unit on Bush's presidency & the post 9/11 world holy crap.

[Nadine in NY Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a subtle and powerful collection of poetry, written by a woman who looks back on her life with a mix of wistfulness, joy and sorrow, someone who feels the weight of time and decisions made and chances lost and also feels the satisfaction of a good life, someone who misses loved ones who have passed on. Rich, of course, was much more knowledgeable about literature than I ever will be, so sometimes a poem went right over my head, but that's okay.

Memorize This

i
Love for twenty-six years, you can't stop
A withered petunia's crisp the bud sticky both are dark
The flower engulfed in its own purple So common, nothing
like it

The old woodstove gone to the dump
Sun plunges through the new skylight
This morning's clouds piled like autumn in Massachusetts
This afternoon's far-flung like the Mojave
Night melts one body into another
One drives fast the other maps a route
Thought new it becomes familiar
From thirteen years back maybe
One oils the hinges one edges the knives
One loses an earring the other finds it
One says I'd rather make love
Than go to the Greek Festival
The other, I agree.

ii
Take a strand of your hair
on my fingers let it fall
across the pillow lift to my nostrils
inhale your body entire

Sleeping with you after
weeks apart how normal
yet after midnight
to turn and slide my arm
along your thigh
drawn up in sleep
what delicate amaze

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first time reading a collection of Rich's poetry. Three sections of poetry within are amazing. "USonian Journals 2000," "Territory Shared," and "Dislocations: Seven Scenarios" were all worth picking up the book. The other five sections were more challenging, and I didn't quite have the mental acuity to understand what she was doing. Perhaps with more time or revisiting at a later date I'll feel differently.

[bella · Rating 3 out of 5]

i wish i had more words but rich’s way with language is so overtly Okay to me. i read diving into the wreck and felt it was a decent batch of poems, it didn’t have the teeth that i craved. though there are a few gems in here, maybe it’s because of her annoying page breaks or her disorienting poetic intricacies but i wish i related to her more than i do.

[Nancy Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meh.

[Kerri Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

"For both of us, the desert isn't vacancy or fear, it's life, a million forms of witness. The fake road, its cruel deception, is what we have to abandon." —from "Incline"

"White people doing and seeing no evil.
...
...We were at the time in the time of our
displacement, being torn from a false integrity." —from "Artworks (I)"

[Nothing but five stars for Rich's ability to be honest about herself, this world, and poetry as a way to breathe through it, learn from it, and set the false parts of this world and our own stories ablaze.]



-----------------------------
First review from September 2012:

So often with good collections of poetry I want to show you, not tell you. So:

In response to your inquiry: this is a very complex operation. We have a wide range of specializations and concerns. Some are especially calibrated toward language

because of its known and unknown powers
to bind and to dissociate

because of its capacity
to ostracize the speechless

because of its capacity
to nourish self-deception

because of its capacity
for rebirth and subversion

because of the history
of torture
against human speech.

-from "Usonian Journals"

[Four stars for poignant storytelling, and an unexpected Tesla reference.]

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feminist, queer poet? You'd think Adrienne Rich would be right up my alley. Alas, I find her poetry somewhat impenetrable for me; I usually bounced right off the poems, although I understood one or two of them enough to really enjoy them. I think, essentially, that Adrienne Rich is just not the poet for me, although I think that she is an excellent poet and for those of you who like more obscure works, she may very well be exactly what you're looking for.

[Elizabeth]

I admire so much what Rich is trying to do here, and I appreciate her wrestling on the page.
But it seems like her drive to put down on paper the violent fragmentation of our lives has stripped the music from these poems, and I miss the music.

[Magali · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well that was intense. I love Adrienne Rich so much but all of her collections don't have the kind of strength this one does. One of my favorite.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the first collection of Rich’s work I’ve read, and I may have chosen incorrectly from the library shelf. While a few poems shimmered, many more were sadly inscrutable for me. The collection is a portal to the early Bush years, crammed with overt political references and an overall acerbic bleakness that generally isn’t what I, as a reader, am looking for in poetry. Of course, nothing is off limits, and perhaps reading these poems in the milieu they were composed in may have had more resonance, but from the vantage of a decade and half many of the poems didn’t quite rise off the page and claim a more timeless place.

Would definitely try again with a different, probably earlier, collection though!

[Faith Tydings · Rating 2 out of 5]

All I could think, while reading this, was that Rich’s Word program must have been throwing red and green lines like crazy because there is so little punctuation and so many awkward spaces. I will never fully understand poetry and its ability to be completely disheveled and out of sorts with any rules. But, here you have the perfect example.

I did not connect with this book. It was too disarranged and I couldn't follow her train of thought.

[Sarah Wahl]

"Ritual Acts iii"
After all - to have loved, wasn't that the object? / Love is the only thing in life / but then you can love too much / or the wrong way, you lose / yourself or you lose / the person / or you strangle each other / Maybe the object of love is / to have loved / greatly / at one time or another / Like a cinema trailer / watched long ago

[Ace McClelland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lovely and beautiful.

[Eman Z · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection of poems. Adrienne Rich does an amazing job of describing the dystopia of American politics while also showing the tenderness of lesbian love.

[Streator Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I just wish I understood these poems.....

[Emily · Rating 1 out of 5]

Adrienne Rich just isn't for me, I guess. I appreciated the title poem, but the rest left me cold.

[faith adams-michaels · Rating 4 out of 5]

she was feeling her way down in the dark

[Alyssa Tuininga · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of these were beautiful, some went very clearly over my head.

[Ash Sandstrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

More abstract than the other Rich I've read.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kerri quoted this same piece, but well, it is the best part:

In response to your inquiry: this is a very complex operation. We have a wide range of specializations and concerns. Some are especially calibrated toward language

because of its known and unknown powers
to bind and to dissociate

because of its capacity
to ostracize the speechless

because of its capacity
to nourish self-deception

because of its capacity
for rebirth and subversion

because of the history
of torture
against human speech.

Otherwise? It felt a bit inauthentic. I get the aims - but I think some stories can only be told when you've lived them. Sorry, Adrienne Rich.

[2 stars for all the undelivered promise.]

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of poems is densely packed with wonderful images but somehow I feel that the music is gone. Another disturbing thing I find is that these poems actually NEED the notes at the end of the book. How else are we supposed to understand any meaning in ambiguous references like: "October '17/ May '68/ September '73." So of course, I find it troubling that the best lines in this book are surrounded by an almost purposeful ciphering. Why?

Still, when Rich is overcome by the insanity of inspiration, her poems take a turn upward, though unfortunately not enough for any ONE poem to be that much better or worse than another.

[Niel Rosenthalis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although I'm a bigger fan of Rich's earlier work, I still find lots to love here. Strong images unite with a clear, focused tone (that's almost stale in that it's almost trademark but still somehow retains its original bite, which is notable after so many years of using it to rev each poem's engine.) I admire her political slant, though I understand how it can get in the way for some of her poems and for some of her readers. I LOVE the title, and I think if I ever put together a book, I'll choose a similarly immediately imagistic title.

[Joanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is not that Adrienne Rich's later work is less good than her early poems - it is simply that they are less comfortable. These poems require the reader to sit with them, to hear their echo while looking in the mirror and then outward at their own world. In one, she asks, "If art is our only resistance, what does that make us" and in the next line uses the word collaborators. Her poems are not a cry to action, they have gone past that and achieved a kind of transcendent howl that calls to the humanity in each of us.

[Joem · Rating 1 out of 5]

(Note: I did not finish this, but I gave up reading.) The first several poems are horrible. They are exactly what I would expect someone mocking poetry to write... Extremely aloof, strange/random phrases, forced poignancy, centaurs. It took until page 30-something to find a poem I didn't strongly hate. I can't say whether or not I liked it, though. It probably just wasn't as bad as the rest. I read some more, then they declined again. I stopped about half way through the book. (I should also note that I read the title poem and felt it was one of the worst offenders.)