| Even
revolutionaries grow old. Now seventy, Adrienne Rich, the poet laureate
of radical feminism, sees the future mostly in terms of her own
past. "Looking backward / into this future" becomes the
defining gesture of her new book, Midnight Salvage, the seventeenth
collection in her long, distinguished career. As the title suggests,
Midnight Salvage is a dark work, an unsparing analysis of
the author’s own legacy of revolutionary advocacy.
Rich,
who has lived in Santa Cruz for the past fifteen years, enjoys–and
also perhaps suffers from–a unique status in American poetry.
While she is not our only major living poet, her reputation vastly
overflows the poetry world’s small pond. Richard Wilbur, Donald
Justice, and Gwendolyn Brooks may safely be called major literary
figures, but Rich alone ranks as a major cultural figure. No other
living poet–not even best-selling Robert Bly–has made
such a profound impression on American intellectual life.
Rich’s
preeminence, however, has come at a price. Around 1970, midway through
her engagement with feminism, Rich‘s poetry changed. It grew
or diminished–depending on the reader’s point of view–by
becoming more overtly ideological. She still wrote about her own
life, but now she portrayed it as an exemplary general story of
contemporary women. The author’s "I" gradually became
the collective and often partisan "we."
Many
readers never forgave her transformation from lyric poet to feminist
prophet. But Rich’s radical redefinition of herself attracted
many new readers outside the coteries of contemporary poetry. She
became our most controversial poet and also perhaps our most influential
one, though ironically her impact was rarely seen on other poets.
The writers who prized early Rich have mostly left late Rich to
the academic theorists.
Midnight
Salvage will change no one’s mind about Rich. Her partisans
will praise the depth and ardor of her meditations on social and
psychological revolution. Her detractors will find ample evidence
of decline in the book’s often disjointed poems and grim intellectuality.
(Rich is too busy denouncing human folly ever to stop and enjoy
it.)
What
no one will fault is the poet’s intensity. If ever a writer
fulfilled Walter Pater’s ideal of burning always with a "hard,
gemlike flame," it is Rich. She is a human acetylene torch
intent on searing through oppression and convention. This wild intensity,
however, often proves her artistic downfall. So keenly focused on
the austere agenda of political transformation, she too often neglects
the amoral pleasures of the imagination. On the barricades one communicates
mostly by shouting.
The
new book consists mostly of long sequences–loosely connected
groups of short poems centered on a common subject. Significantly,
Rich is at her best writing about someone other than herself. She
is especially good at portraying the spiritual and psychological
inner lives of revolutionary icons. The strongest new work ponders
the life of surrealist poet René Char who fought with the
French Resistance. Another arresting poem reflects on Tina Modotti,
the Mexican photographer and activist, who becomes a heroic alter
ego for the poet.
The
great blind spot of old revolutionaries is the generation gap. They
cannot quite grasp the passions of their own fiery youth no longer
burn brightly for today’s young. At key moments in Midnight
Salvage Rich falls into a sentimental political retrospection.
The book’s final seventeen-page sequence, "A Long Conversation,"
for example, contains whole paragraphs quoted from "The Communist
Manifesto." Once so disdainful of nostalgia, Rich now seems
possessed by it.
There
are still moments of lyric power in Midnight Salvage but
not enough to save the book from didacticism and self-indulgence.
Ironically, the writer Rich now most closely resembles is Ezra Pound,
a political poet of wildly different creed. In his late Cantos,
Pound, an experimental genius turned fascist, fell into earnest
incoherence lit by occasional flashes of poetic brilliance. Like
Pound, Rich is a major poet overburdened by the role of prophet.
She remains an intellectual force, but she has almost vanished as
a credible poet, and I for one lament the loss.
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