Adrienne Rich Adrienne Cecile Rich, an American poet, writer, and feminist, was born on May 16, 1929, and passed away on March 27, 2012. She was praised for bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse" and was dubbed "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century." Rich decried inflexible feminist identities and championed what she called the "lesbian continuum," a female network of creativity and solidarity that influences and nourishes women's lives. Icon W. H. Auden chose her debut poetry collection, A Change of World, as the recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Auden continued writing the book's introduction. In a well-known show of defiance against House Speaker Newt Gingrich's move to sever funding for the National Endowment for the Arts, Rich publicly declined the National Medal of Arts. Early life and educationThe eldest of two sisters, Adrienne Cecile Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on May 16, 1929. Arnold Rice Rich, a pathologist, was her father and the Johns Hopkins Medical School's chairman of pathology. Helen Elizabeth (Jones) Rich, her mother, was a composer and concert pianist. Her mother was a Southern Protestant, while her father was Jewish; the girls were brought up as Christians. Her mother was a Sephardi Jew from Vicksburg, Mississippi, and her paternal grandfather, Samuel Rice, was an Ashkenazi immigrant from Košice in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (modern-day Slovakia). Samuel Rice ran a prosperous Birmingham shoe business. Adrienne Rich's father was a big poetry fan and pushed her to compose poems as well as read them. Her father's collection, where she perused the writings of authors like Ibsen, Arnold, Blake, Keats, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Tennyson, ignited her interest in reading. Her father "planned to create a prodigy" out of ambition for Adrienne. Adrienne Rich's mother homeschooled her and her younger sister until Adrienne started attending public school in the fourth grade. Her connection with her father is chronicled in the poems Sources and After Dark, where she describes how she strived to live up to her parents' high standards in an environment where greatness was expected. Rich later attended the "good old fashioned girls' school [that] gave us fine role models of single women who were intellectually impassioned." Rich also attended Roland Park Country School. Rich attended Radcliffe College to get her diploma after high school, where she majored in poetry and the writing craft and had no female instructors at all. Rich's first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award in 1951, during her final year of college. He continued by penning the published volume's introduction. Rich was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at Oxford for a year after graduating. She decided not to go back to Oxford after seeing Florence, and she spent the rest of her time in Europe writing and travelling across Italy. Early career: 1953-75Rich married Harvard University economics professor Alfred Haskell Conrad in 1953 after meeting him while still an undergraduate. "I married partly because I knew no better way to detach from my first family," she remarked in reference to the match. I desired a woman's existence to the fullest extent that it was conceivable." They had three kids and made Cambridge, Massachusetts, their permanent home. "A lot of the poems are incredibly derivative," she remarked, blaming a "pressure to produce again... to make sure I was still a poet." She published her second volume, The Diamond Cutters, in 1955. She later said she wished the collection had never been published. The Poetry Society of America also gave her the Ridgely Torrence Memorial Award that year. David, Pablo, and Jacob, her three children, were born in 1955, 1957, and 1959, respectively. Rich's life underwent significant transformation in the 1960s after she was awarded the National Institute of Arts and Letters prize in 1960, her second Guggenheim Fellowship in 1961 to work at the Netherlands Economic Institute, and a grant from the Bollingen Foundation in 1962 to translate Dutch poetry. After relocating her family to New York in 1966, Rich got deeply involved in feminist, civil rights, and anti-war activities and joined the New Left. Her spouse started working as a teacher at City College of New York. She joined the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge in 1968, pledging to withhold taxes in opposition to the Vietnam War. During this time, she published volumes such as Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971), which showcase her interest in poetic form and increasingly radical political themes. Rich was an adjunct professor in the Writing Division at Columbia University School of the Arts and gave lectures at Swarthmore College in 1967-1969. She also started teaching at the City College of New York SEEK programme in 1968 and stayed there until 1975. Poetry Magazine awarded Rich the Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize during this same period. At their flat, Rich and Conrad threw fundraising events for the Black Panthers and against war. As the marriage grew more strained, Rich moved out in the middle of 1970 and moved into a neighbouring little studio apartment. Rich was left widowed shortly after when Conrad drove into the woods in October and shot himself. She received the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award in 1971, and for the next year and a half, she was the Hurst visiting professor of creative writing at Brandeis University. Along with Allen Ginsberg's The Fall of America, Diving into the Wreck, a collection of introspective and frequently irascible poetry, shared the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry. The two other feminist poets nominated, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, joined Rich in declining to accept it individually, choosing instead to accept it on behalf of all women "whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world." Rich began serving as the Lucy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College the following year. Later life: 1976-2012Rich started working with novelist and editor Michelle Cliff, a Jamaican native, in 1976. Their collaboration continued until Cliff's passing. Rich acknowledged that lesbianism was a political issue for her as well as a personal one in her controversial book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, which was published that same year. Rich wrote, "The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs". Her first direct treatment of lesbian desire and sexuality appeared in the pamphlet Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), which was included in the next year's Dream of a Common Language (1978). These themes recur in her later work, particularly in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and some of her later poems in The Fact of a Doorframe (2001). According to Langdell's analysis in Adrienne Rich: the moment of transition, these poems serve as a key rite of passage for the poet as she enters a freshly constellated life and a "new relationship with the universe." Rich also penned several important socio-political writings at this time, one of which being "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," which was among the first to discuss the subject of lesbian existence. In this piece, she explores "how and why women's choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, community, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding" . On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (1979) republished a few of the essays. By incorporating these elements into her work, Rich came out as a woman and assumed a leadership position in the movement for sexual equality. Rich was an English professor at City College and Rutgers University from 1976 until 1979. She moved to Montague, Massachusetts, with Cliff after receiving an honorary degree from Smith College in 1979. In the end, they relocated to Santa Cruz, where Rich carried on with her work as a writer, professor, lecturer, and poet. From 1981 to 1983, Rich and Cliff served as editors of the lesbian arts publication Sinister Wisdom. In the 1980s and 90s, Rich gave lectures and taught at Stanford University, San Jose State University, Scripps College, and UC Santa Cruz. Rich was an A.D. from 1981 to 1987. White Cornell University Professor-At-Large. Over the next few years, Rich released other books, including Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988 (1989), Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986), and Your Native Land, Your Life (1986). In addition, she received the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in Arts and Letters from NYU, the Ruth Paul Lilly Poetry Prize (1986), and the National Poetry Association Award for Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry (1989). In 1977, Rich became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP). WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media. Janice Raymond referenced Rich in the chapter "Sappho by Surgery" in her 1979 book The Transsexual Empire and praised her for "constant encouragement" in the foreword. Some LGBT and feminist critics view "The Transsexual Empire" as transphobic, and Rich has come under fire for her participation in and support of the film's development. Rich was supportive of Raymond's efforts even if she never publicly denied it, according to Leslie Feinberg, who cited Rich while authoring Transgender Warriors. Rich's rheumatoid arthritis had her relying on wheelchairs and canes by the early 1980s. Rich was diagnosed with the illness at the age of 22, but she concealed her impairment for several years. Rich and Cliff chose to go to California because of the harsh climate in New England. Following a spinal surgery in 1992, Rich had to wear a metal halo that was fastened onto her skull. Notes Towards a Politics of Location was the title of Rich's June 1984 lecture at the International Conference of Women, Feminist Identity, and Society in Utrecht, Netherlands. Her keynote address is a seminal work on the politics of place and the emergence of the idea of female "locatedness". Rich aims to reunite female thought and speech with the female body by talking about the places from which women speak, with the goal of reclaiming the body by verbalising self-representation. Rich states at the beginning of her speech that although she is speaking the phrases in Europe, she had looked them up in the United States. She shows her care for all women, not just women in Providence, by addressing her place in an essay on the development of the women's movement. Rich encourages all women to think about their existence and contributes to a wider movement by reaching out to women all across the world. Rich urges women to consider their origins by having them visualise certain locations on a map as historical sites and sites where women are formed, then concentrating on those locations. Rich invites the audience to start with the geography that is nearest to them—their body—instead of starting with a continent, nation, or residence in an effort to try and discover a sense of belonging in the world. Therefore, Rich pushes readers and audience members to create their own identities by refusing to let the boundaries of their home, place of worship, and government define them. The women's movement at the close of the 20th century is hypothesised in this essay. Rich makes a strong case for the women's movement by explaining how it is an evolution in and of itself. The movement achieves critical mass by de-Westernizing and de-masculinizing itself, resulting in a multitude of voices, languages, and overall acts. In order to undergo change, she begs that the movement alter. She goes on to say that women need to make the change. Rich examines how one's upbringing may affect their identity in her essay. She adds to this idea by mentioning her own investigation of the body—her body as a woman, a white woman, a Jewish woman, and a body in a country. Rich makes pains to specify the setting in which her works are set. Rich keeps coming back to the idea of location in her article. She describes how she came to see how the women's movement, which was first based in Western culture and focused only on the issues facing white women, eventually included the written and spoken expressions of black Americans. These occupations have given her the opportunity to understand what it meant to be white and that she had to accept responsibility for it. She released the essay in 1986 as part of her writing collection Blood, Bread, and Poetry. Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends was founded in 1990 as a result of Rich's involvement with the New Jewish Agenda. Rich was the journal's editor. The link between private and public histories was examined in this book, particularly as it related to the rights of Jewish women. Her second published work, An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), was honoured with the Poet's Prize in 1993, the Commonwealth Award in Literature in 1991, the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry, and the Lenore Marshall/Nation Award. Rich joined advisory boards in the 1990s for organisations such Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa, the National Writers Union, and the Boston Woman's Fund. Concerning the position of the poet, she wrote, "We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation." Rich's talents as a poet and writer earned her the MacArthur Fellowship, also known as the "Genius Grant," in July 1994. Julia Arden Conrad and Charles Reddington Conrad gained a grandma in 1992 as well. "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration... [Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage," Rich said when he declined the National Medal of Arts in 1997 in protest of the House of Representatives' vote to end the National Endowment for the Arts and the Clinton Administration's policies regarding the arts in general and literature in particular. Her next books, Fox: Poems 1998-2000 (2001), The Art of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (2001), and Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998 (1999), were a combination of poetry and essay. Rich took part in anti-war protests in the early 2000s, voicing her opposition to the prospect of war in Iraq through poetry readings and other events. Along with Yusef Komunyakaa, Lucille Clifton, Jay Wright (who declined the position), Louise Glück, Heather McHugh, Rosanna Warren, Charles Wright, Robert Creeley, and Michael Palmer, she was named a chancellor of the newly expanded board of the Academy of American Poets in 2002. The judges praised her for her "honesty at once ferocious, humane, her deep learning, and her continuous poetic exploration and awareness of multiple selves" after she was awarded the 2003 Yale Bollingen Prize for American Poetry. Rich was honoured for her work in October 2006 by Equality Forum, which featured her as a symbol of LGBT history. Rich supported the 2009 call for a cultural and academic boycott of Israel, despite his initial misgivings about the movement. He denounced "the Occupation's denial of Palestinian humanity, destruction of Palestinian lives and livelihoods, the "settlements," the state's physical and psychological walls against dialogue." At the age of 82, Rich passed away in her Santa Cruz, California, home on March 27, 2012. According to her son Pablo Conrad, she had chronic rheumatoid arthritis, which ultimately led to her death. The year prior to her passing, her final collection was released. Rich's partner Michelle Cliff, her sons, and her two grandkids survive her. ViewsOn feminismRich authored multiple works that discuss women's rights in society. She provided a critical examination of what it's like to be a mother and a daughter-in-law, as well as the effects of gender on these roles, in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law. When she began writing on feminism and other social issues in the early 1970s, she began to take a darker tone, which is evident in Diving into the Wreck. She expressed her fury at the patriarchal nature of society in general and in her writings. By doing this, she set an example for other women to follow, with the goal being the abolition of sexism by persistent, proactive efforts against it. Her poetry is renowned for their feminist undertones as well. "Power" is a poem that explores Marie Curie, a significant female figure of the 20th century. She talked about feminism and the element of power in this poem. Rich alludes to Curie's source of power—the radiation she was exposed to throughout her research—as her slow demise. The poem explores the idea of power, especially as it relates to women. Rich authored poetry, novels, and nonfiction works that addressed feminism. A few of these were Blood, Bread, and Poetry; Of Woman Born; Motherhood as Experience and Institution, etc. In particular, the well-known feminist essays "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" and "Feminism and Community" may be found in Bread and Poetry. Rich's comprehensive viewpoint on feminism and society was exhibited through her books, interviews, and documentaries. Rich had some thoughts regarding the term's usage, to start. She seemed more comfortable calling it "women's liberation" than "feminism." The latter word, in her opinion, was more likely to elicit resistance from women in the following generation. Furthermore, she was afraid that if the term was used a lot, it would just become a label. However, the phrase "women's liberation" refers to the ultimate freedom of women from everything that can be viewed as repressive to their rights. In-depth articles on "white feminism" and the necessity of intersectionality in the feminist movement were also written by Rich. In Blood, Bread, and Poetry, Rich stated that "feminism became a political and spiritual base from which I could move to examine rather than try to hide my own racism, recognise that I have anti-racist work to do continuously within myself." She continued by stating that "so long as [feminists] identify only with white women, we are still connected to that system of objectification and callousness and cruelty called racism." In addition to their position as the oppressors, Rich pleaded with white feminists to take into account the reality that "[they], as victims of objectification, have objectified other women" because of their innate white privilege under a racist government. Rich's writings clearly reflect her feminism beliefs. In "Of Woman Born," she states that "we need to understand the power and powerlessness embodied in motherhood in patriarchal culture." In her book On Lies, Secrets, and Silence, she also discusses the necessity for women to band together. "Women have often felt insane when cleaving to the truth of our experience," the author stated in this book. We have a great interest in describing our reality to one another as honestly and completely as we can since our future depends on each of us maintaining our sanity." In light of the feminist landscape of the 1950s through 1970s, Rich's contributions to feminism can be considered revolutionary. For the time being, her opinions on equality and the necessity for women to realise their full potential can be considered progressive. Her opinions were very much in line with feminist ideas of the time. Rich claims that patriarchy, which restricts women's rights, was the foundation of society. To attain gender parity, the dominant ideas need to be reshaped to take into account the viewpoint of women. On racismRich wrote extensively about intersectionality in the feminist movement and white feminism. Drawing from the writings of notable black feminist scholars and activists including Toni Morrison, Lorraine Bethel, Michele Russell, and Gloria T. Hull, Rich devoted multiple chapters of her book Blood, Bread, and Poetry to the topic of racism. Rich stated that her article "could have been stronger had it drawn on more of the literature by Black woman towards which Toni Morrison's Sula inevitably pointed me" in reference to her essay Of Woman Born. In Blood, Bread, and Poetry, Rich discussed the advantages that come with being a white feminist writer, noting that she "is likely to be taken more seriously in certain quarters than the Black woman scholar whose combined experience and research give her far more penetrating knowledge and awareness than mine." Because I'm white and because it's a component of my privilege—even my credibility—that women of colour who are scholars, critics, poets, or novelists are invisible, I will be given more weight." Together with Audre Lorde, Rich co-presented the keynote presentation for the National Women's Studies Association Convention in Storrs, Connecticut in 1981. Her speech was titled "Disobedience is What NWSA is Potentially About." Rich brought attention to the racism and homophobia that persisted "in the enclave of Women's studies itself, where lesbians are still feared, and women of colour are still ignored" in light of the convention's "Women Respond to Racism" theme. "Women of colour who are found in the wrong place as defined at any given time by the white fathers will receive their retribution unseen," Rich continued: White women are not expected to even be aware that these things happen, much less sympathise with the horrors undergone, if they are beaten, raped, insulted, harassed, mutilated, or murdered. These incidents will go unreported, unpunished, and unconnected." Rich put to the audience: 'how disobedient will Women's Studies be in the 1980s; how will this Association address the racism, misogyny, homophobia of the university and of the corporate and militist society in which it is embedded; how will white feminist scholars and teachers and students practise disobedience to patriarchy? Rich pleaded with the audience to let go of the notion that "white women somehow cease to carry racism within them by opposing racist violence, by doing anti-racist work, or by becoming feminists." She claimed that white women are never freed from their white privilege and that they must constantly dedicate themselves to anti-racist work as long as they are still playing the oppressor. The U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (USACBI) received support from Rich in 2009 when she released a statement denouncing Israeli occupation and pledging her "continued solidarity with the Palestinian people's long resistance." Selected awards and honours
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