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Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations
These essays trace a distinguished writer's engagement with her time, her arguments with herself and others. "I am a poet who knows the social power of poetry, a United States citizen who knows herself irrevocably tangled in her society's hopes, arrogance, and despair," Adrienne Rich writes.
The essays in Arts of the Possible search for possibilities beyond a compromised, degraded system, seeking to imagine something else. They call on the fluidity of the imagination, from poetic vision to social justice, from the badlands of political demoralization to an art that might wound, that may open scars when engaged in its work, but will finally suture and not tear apart.
This volume collects Rich's essays from the last decade of the twentieth century, including four earlier essays, as well as several conversations that go further than the usual interview. Also included is her essay explaining her reasons for declining the National Medal for the Arts.
The essays in Arts of the Possible search for possibilities beyond a compromised, degraded system, seeking to imagine something else. They call on the fluidity of the imagination, from poetic vision to social justice, from the badlands of political demoralization to an art that might wound, that may open scars when engaged in its work, but will finally suture and not tear apart.
This volume collects Rich's essays from the last decade of the twentieth century, including four earlier essays, as well as several conversations that go further than the usual interview. Also included is her essay explaining her reasons for declining the National Medal for the Arts.
256 pages, Hardcover
First published April 17, 2001
20 people are currently reading
827 people want to read
About the author
Adrienne Rich
139 books1,576 followersWorks, 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).
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).
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
October 11, 2016
"Arts of the Possible" is a collection of essays, speeches and interviews from the American poet and activist, Adrienne Rich. These short, readable pieces date from 1971 to 1997. The foreword was added by Rich in 2000.
I was unfamiliar with Rich's poems before reading her prose collection. I have found myself returning many times to these essays when I am in search of inspiration. She constantly looks for connections between ideas and people. While she has seen the rise of identity politics and its tendency to splinter people into warring factions, she urges us to discover our common humanity. She challenges "professional intellectuals" i.e. writers and academics, to leave their ivory towers and engage in real world struggles.
"Writing and teaching all kinds of work and the relative creative freedom of the writer or teacher depends on the conditions of human labour overall and everywhere." (p167)
A humanistic form of Marxism and feminism suffuse her work. Her clear-sighted analyses of the body, gender, race and class are still radical. I found my prejudices and assumptions constantly challenged by Rich. In writing about Raya Dunyevskaya, she could just as easily be writing about herself:
"Her writings, with all their passion, energy, wit and learning, may read awkwardly at times because she is really writing against the grain of how many readers have learned to think."
She predicts the rise of demagogues and the degradation of American public discourse.
"In a country where native-born fascistic tendencies, allied to the practices of the "free "market that have been eviscerating language of meaning, the public space is indeed befouled."
Yet there is a thread of optimism running through the book. She believes, like Marx, that society can provide equality, literacy and freedom for all. America, she argues, is capable of becoming a society which "honours both human individuality and the search for a decent common life."
She believes that language is powerful and that the poetry is a means of self-expression and deliberation, reminding us of the possibility of beauty and of our kinship with others.
"Poetry, as Audre Lorde wrote long ago, is no luxury."
You will not regret reading these short works. They may well change the way you think, as they did for me.
I was unfamiliar with Rich's poems before reading her prose collection. I have found myself returning many times to these essays when I am in search of inspiration. She constantly looks for connections between ideas and people. While she has seen the rise of identity politics and its tendency to splinter people into warring factions, she urges us to discover our common humanity. She challenges "professional intellectuals" i.e. writers and academics, to leave their ivory towers and engage in real world struggles.
"Writing and teaching all kinds of work and the relative creative freedom of the writer or teacher depends on the conditions of human labour overall and everywhere." (p167)
A humanistic form of Marxism and feminism suffuse her work. Her clear-sighted analyses of the body, gender, race and class are still radical. I found my prejudices and assumptions constantly challenged by Rich. In writing about Raya Dunyevskaya, she could just as easily be writing about herself:
"Her writings, with all their passion, energy, wit and learning, may read awkwardly at times because she is really writing against the grain of how many readers have learned to think."
She predicts the rise of demagogues and the degradation of American public discourse.
"In a country where native-born fascistic tendencies, allied to the practices of the "free "market that have been eviscerating language of meaning, the public space is indeed befouled."
Yet there is a thread of optimism running through the book. She believes, like Marx, that society can provide equality, literacy and freedom for all. America, she argues, is capable of becoming a society which "honours both human individuality and the search for a decent common life."
She believes that language is powerful and that the poetry is a means of self-expression and deliberation, reminding us of the possibility of beauty and of our kinship with others.
"Poetry, as Audre Lorde wrote long ago, is no luxury."
You will not regret reading these short works. They may well change the way you think, as they did for me.
May 18, 2014
Bored to sobs.
January 28, 2016
4,5
Alguns dels assajos són imprescindibles!
Alguns dels assajos són imprescindibles!
July 30, 2022
“Along with this crisis in our own country I have been thinking about the self-congratulatory self-promotion of capitalism as a global, transnational order, superseding governments and the very meaning of free elections. I have especially been noting the corruptions of language employed to manage our perceptions of all this. Where democracy becomes "free enterprise,”
individual rights the self-interest of capital, it's no wonder that the complex of social policies needed to further democratic equality is dismissed as a hulk of obsolete junk known as "big government." In the vocabulary kidnapped from liberatory politics, no word has been so pimped as freedom.
I've been struck by the presumption, endlessly issuing from the media, in academic discourse, and from liberal as well as conservative platforms, that the questions raised by Marxism, socialism, and communism must inexorably be identified with their use and abuse by certain repressively authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century: therefore they are hence-forth to be nonquestions. That because Marxism, socialism, communism were aliases employed by certain stagnating, cruel, and unscrupulous systems, they have and shall have no other existence than as masks for those systems. That American capitalism is the liberatory force of the future with a transnational mission to quench all efforts to keep these questions alive." (147-148)
individual rights the self-interest of capital, it's no wonder that the complex of social policies needed to further democratic equality is dismissed as a hulk of obsolete junk known as "big government." In the vocabulary kidnapped from liberatory politics, no word has been so pimped as freedom.
I've been struck by the presumption, endlessly issuing from the media, in academic discourse, and from liberal as well as conservative platforms, that the questions raised by Marxism, socialism, and communism must inexorably be identified with their use and abuse by certain repressively authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century: therefore they are hence-forth to be nonquestions. That because Marxism, socialism, communism were aliases employed by certain stagnating, cruel, and unscrupulous systems, they have and shall have no other existence than as masks for those systems. That American capitalism is the liberatory force of the future with a transnational mission to quench all efforts to keep these questions alive." (147-148)
June 26, 2018
I liked her essays on Marxism, politics and revolution more than those that focussed on poetry and feminism. Refreshing insights into language. Her last essay "Arts of the Possible" is fantastic, a rallying call for this age, to "question the questions." My takeaway: it is hypocritical to love to write or to create "in a vacuum," in loving language, we must think about who has access to language, and who is being denied this access. We also must ask the basic questions that may otherwise be dismissed as childlike and premodern.
"What is ownership? What is work?... How can we move from a production system in which human labor is merely a disposable means to a process that depends on and expands connective relationships, mutual respect, the dignity of work, the fullest possible development of the human subject?"
“Federal funding for the arts, like the philanthropy of private arts patrons, can be given and taken away. In the long run art needs to grow organically out of a social compost nourishing to everyone, a literate citizenry, a free, universal, public education complex with art as an integral element, a society honouring both human individuality and the search for a decent, sustainable common life. In such conditions, art would still be a voice of hunger, desire, discontent, passion, remind us that the democratic project is never-ending.”
"What is ownership? What is work?... How can we move from a production system in which human labor is merely a disposable means to a process that depends on and expands connective relationships, mutual respect, the dignity of work, the fullest possible development of the human subject?"
“Federal funding for the arts, like the philanthropy of private arts patrons, can be given and taken away. In the long run art needs to grow organically out of a social compost nourishing to everyone, a literate citizenry, a free, universal, public education complex with art as an integral element, a society honouring both human individuality and the search for a decent, sustainable common life. In such conditions, art would still be a voice of hunger, desire, discontent, passion, remind us that the democratic project is never-ending.”
October 5, 2025
An interesting although truncated collection of Rich’s essays lectures, and conversations.
There’s inconsistency in the notes (most likely due to the diverse formats on display here and the annotations present in the original publishings of some pieces) which proves inconvenient but the closing title essay is one worth studying.
In it, Rich remarks that
“The relationship of the individual to a community, to social power, and to the great upheavals of collective human experience will always be the richest and most complex of questions. The blotted-out question might well be: with any personal history, what is to be done? What do we know when we know your story? With whom do you believe your lot is cast?”
Her reflective scrutiny of intersections within not only personal identity but its transformative potential to shape communities makes for great reading.
There’s inconsistency in the notes (most likely due to the diverse formats on display here and the annotations present in the original publishings of some pieces) which proves inconvenient but the closing title essay is one worth studying.
In it, Rich remarks that
“The relationship of the individual to a community, to social power, and to the great upheavals of collective human experience will always be the richest and most complex of questions. The blotted-out question might well be: with any personal history, what is to be done? What do we know when we know your story? With whom do you believe your lot is cast?”
Her reflective scrutiny of intersections within not only personal identity but its transformative potential to shape communities makes for great reading.
September 6, 2025
i’ve been told of how amazing adrienne rich is and have never experienced it truly for myself. this book caught my eye in one of the bookstores downtown, and even though these essays are from the 70’s-90’s, they are incredibly timeless and speak to what it is to be an american, an artist, a poet, and a human being in the country and world we’re in. the book also casts light on so many influential thinkers and writers who rich admired and gave the highest of honors. there is so much to say and quote from this book. my hand was cramping from how much of it i copied into my journal. so glad i read this.
August 7, 2018
Profoundly inspired and informed essays on the intersections of the formal and the political, the self and the outside world, and the personal and the collective. What’s also interesting to me is how Rich so effortlessly moves on, and blurs the lines between awareness, consciousness and knowledge.
November 30, 2019
i loved some of the pieces, but didn’t really enjoy others. the collection just seems to have no cohesion or main point. i was expecting more writings specifically on poetry, literature and art. nevertheless, it’s still a good book with some great ideas and excerpts, because it’s just adrienne rich.
November 22, 2019
Me encanta Adrienne Rich. Me encanta leerla y recordar todo aquello que nos quieren quitar: la posibilidad de encontrarnos, el derecho a reclamarnos una y otra vez y la certeza de que se puede y debe desafiar y cambiar nuestra realidad.
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January 1, 2024
This is a collection of essays, where Adrienne Rich displays not only sympathy, but also hope and possible solutions. It’s most unfortunate that 20 years after its publication, her words still ring true concerning politics and society.
November 1, 2020
Think I need to have more exposure to her poetry to appreciate this more.
June 26, 2022
Once again, I love Adrienne Rich, as a poet and a thinker, nothing else remains to be said.
December 31, 2024
read this because it was mentioned in THE COST OF LIVING and didn't really like it.
3/5
3/5
July 6, 2008
In the America where I'm writing now, suffering is
diagnosed relentlessly as personal, individual, maybe
familial, and at most to be "shared" with a group
specific to the suffering, in the hope of "recovery."
We lack a vocabulary for thinking about pain as
communal and public, or as deriving from "skewed
social relations." (Art, 114)
As seen here in an excerpt from 1996's "Defying the Space That Separates," Adrienne Rich's cultural observations continue, more than a decade after being put to paper, to illuminate reasons for the growing solipsism and sense of alienation that face America today. It should not be surprising then that Rich's social acuity is just as sharp in 2001's Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations, which includes "Defying" alongside other prose pieces that help contextualize its ideas in more specific terms. Essentially, the heart of this civil unrest, Rich suggests, lies in an increasingly rigid and formulaic use of language that arises from "exploitative relations of production" (Art, 145). Such exclusory hierarchical systems--being either unwilling or unable to synthesize a dream-worthy symbolic universe--reveal for Rich the mounting social disjointedness and poverty of language that are implicit in the basic tenets of capitalism and a free market economy.
diagnosed relentlessly as personal, individual, maybe
familial, and at most to be "shared" with a group
specific to the suffering, in the hope of "recovery."
We lack a vocabulary for thinking about pain as
communal and public, or as deriving from "skewed
social relations." (Art, 114)
As seen here in an excerpt from 1996's "Defying the Space That Separates," Adrienne Rich's cultural observations continue, more than a decade after being put to paper, to illuminate reasons for the growing solipsism and sense of alienation that face America today. It should not be surprising then that Rich's social acuity is just as sharp in 2001's Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations, which includes "Defying" alongside other prose pieces that help contextualize its ideas in more specific terms. Essentially, the heart of this civil unrest, Rich suggests, lies in an increasingly rigid and formulaic use of language that arises from "exploitative relations of production" (Art, 145). Such exclusory hierarchical systems--being either unwilling or unable to synthesize a dream-worthy symbolic universe--reveal for Rich the mounting social disjointedness and poverty of language that are implicit in the basic tenets of capitalism and a free market economy.
April 13, 2012
RIP Adrienne Rich, 28 March, 2012...
I'm currently reading (re-reading) this thought provoking group of essays by Rich.
(I'm late coming into my 'schooling' on poets and poetry.) A few years ago, I was fortunate to listen to a PennSound recording of Ms. Rich, that made me delve deeper into the realms of what is possible when one uses poetry as a vehicle for politics and social awareness.
Last week, after reading the essay that explains why Rich declined the NEA's National award, I remembered why the Penn Sound recording from 2005 rocked my world...here is a woman who stood by her word. Her strength, her conviction, is that of a voice many of us desire, but so few are able to sustain without caving to societal norms.
Adrienne Rich's voice shall be missed. We pray that tomorrow's young women shall continue to read her works and remember her words.
A wonderful reminder to all artist (1997 letter to NEA's head; CC to President Clinton) :
"In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist. "
I'm currently reading (re-reading) this thought provoking group of essays by Rich.
(I'm late coming into my 'schooling' on poets and poetry.) A few years ago, I was fortunate to listen to a PennSound recording of Ms. Rich, that made me delve deeper into the realms of what is possible when one uses poetry as a vehicle for politics and social awareness.
Last week, after reading the essay that explains why Rich declined the NEA's National award, I remembered why the Penn Sound recording from 2005 rocked my world...here is a woman who stood by her word. Her strength, her conviction, is that of a voice many of us desire, but so few are able to sustain without caving to societal norms.
Adrienne Rich's voice shall be missed. We pray that tomorrow's young women shall continue to read her works and remember her words.
A wonderful reminder to all artist (1997 letter to NEA's head; CC to President Clinton) :
"In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist. "
August 30, 2010
I love Rich's poetry, but found myself a little disappointed with her essays. Her work, I think, speaks for itself, and the way in which she speaks about it, as all-encompassing, made it feel trite in a way I'd never felt it was before.
January 23, 2013
The feminist, lesbian poet Adrienne Rich writes fascinating essays on poetry, women, the politics of America and how that affects the arts, the context of the artist. Very thought provoking for me. Took me back to some of the feminist ideas/ideals of my past. Well written. Intelligent.
Want to read
October 29, 2009What I would consider some really quirky poems. I don't know... I think I like her earlier poetry better... And her essays.
July 18, 2010
Great look at her evolution as a poet. Would still like to read a critique of an anthology of her work.
Diving Into the Wreck is simply an amazing poem.
Diving Into the Wreck is simply an amazing poem.
May 1, 2013
Rich gives here her view about feminism and homosexuality against patriarchy
June 20, 2013
This book was my first introduction to feminism enacted through writing. Rich’s essays bring out the political from the poetic.
August 26, 2014
not great, tbh. belabors the obvious.
Read
February 13, 2019Reader in group - "For a poem to coalesce: there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality that is in no way passive. And a certain freedom of the mind is needed freedom to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that …the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away. Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living. nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite, or to call experimentally be another name. For writing is re-naming."
Adrienne Rich, from "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision."
Adrienne Rich, from "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision."
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews