Notes
BIOGRAPHIES
Readers familiar with ADRIENNE RICH know of her “preoccupation” with feminist themes, and often think of her poetry as simply a manifestation of her feminism. Rich herself anticipated the necessity of seeing her work as part of an ever-evolving continuum when she began dating her poems in the mid-1950s, resisting the temptation to have any one piece of poetic work read in isolation from her life’s work, creating a sense of cohesiveness and interconnectivity throughout all that she did.
Nothing in Rich’s early life was particularly indicative of her future as a radical poet and activist. She was born in 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland. Her mother, Helen Gravely Jones Rich was a Southern Protestant, a pianist and composer who chose to raise her daughters instead of pursuing a career in music. Rich’s father, Arnold Rice Rich was a widely renowned physician who taught at Johns Hopkins University. While she would later embrace the Jewish heritage of her father, Rich and her two sisters were raised in the Episcopal Church.
Throughout her early life, Rich’s father encouraged her literary talents, urging her to write poetry as a child. Rich was home-schooled by her mother until the fourth grade, before attending Roland Park Country School, a private (racially segregated) all-girls prep school. Ever the keen student, Rich was admitted to the academically rigorous Radcliffe College in Massachusetts. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1951, the year A Change of World was published and her poetic career launched. Two years later, she married Alfred Haskell Conrad (born Cohen), a Harvard-trained economist.
Rich published The Diamond Cutters (1955) and Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963) while juggling the responsibility of raising three young children, along with the social obligations of being the wife of a Harvard professor before the full bloom of the Women’s Rights Movement.
She began teaching at City College as an adjunct instructor in the SEEK program in 1968, soon after her husband accepted a tenured position in the Economics department there. Her move to New York City proved to be a pivotal one, exposing Rich in new ways to the Civil Rights and antiwar movements that she would become increasingly involved in and which would have an undeniable effect on her. Both Rich and Conrad were deeply involved in student activism at City College, raising bail money for students arrested during antiwar protests on campus and inviting students and radical activists into their home.
Rich’s work at City College profoundly impacted her pedagogy in ways which we have only just begun to realize. She taught at public institutions like City College, Rutgers, and San Jose State, as well as private colleges like Columbia, Cornell, Brandeis, Swarthmore and Stanford. However, in an unusual move for someone of her cultural status and level of professional achievement, she would remain committed to teaching basic writing throughout her career. Rich firmly believed in the power of writing pedagogy as a political tool.
If the move to New York City impacted Rich politically and pedagogically, it also marked a shift in her personal life. In New York, Rich not only reconciled herself to her attraction to women, she committed herself more deeply to the concerns of women in all aspects of her life. Rich’s awareness of herself as a lesbian feminist would intensify from here on out. From the 1970s onward, Rich strove relentlessly to address the lives of women and their political concerns. Her marriage ended in 1970. In 1976 Rich began living with Michelle Cliff, the Jamaican-American writer who would become her life-partner. The following year, she published Twenty One Love Poems, a collection of work detailing her love for women. In the late 1970s Rich also entered a phase of “self-imposed gender segregation during which time she would read for and teach only women.”
Adrienne Rich’s politics were a complex set of signifiers that shifted over the course of her life. Her sense of solidarity was real and risky and bled across her entire practice. In 1974 she refused to accept the National Book Award for poetry on her own behalf, sharing it instead with fellow nominees Audre Lorde (a SEEK colleague) and Alice Walker in the name of all women poets who had been silenced. Other awards Rich would receive included the Academy of American Poets Fellowship in 1992; the MacArthur Fellowship in 1994; and the National Medal of Arts in 1997 (which she completely rejected). Rich’s ambivalence towards public recognition was a hallmark of her fierce feminism and radical politics, which were characterized by urgency, generosity, and courage. She understood the power of her own writing, but did not believe that that power was limited to herself as a singular, oracle-like figure. She was committed to a world of women’s poetry and women’s voices, of which hers was only one. Later in life she would mentor many younger women poets, strongly urging them to experiment with form and content.
Towards the end of her life, Rich’s concerns for social justice became more and more global and were expressed in some of her later poems, as with “The School Among the Ruins: Beirut. Baghdad. Sarajevo. Bethlehem. Kabul. Not Of Course Here.” Adrienne Cecile Rich, radical poet, teacher, feminist, environmentalist, and human rights activist, died in her 83rd year, in 2012, from complications of rheumatoid arthritis at her home in Santa Cruz, California.
AMMIEL ALCALAY is a poet, critic, translator, and scholar who teaches at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and Queens College. General Editor of Lost & Found, his most recent book is a little history.
IEMANJÁ BROWN has worked as an educator in varied settings, organizing around environmental justice through direct action and artistic projects with young people. An English PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY, she teaches at Queens College.
STEFANIA HEIM is a doctoral candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, writing a dissertation called Dark Matter: Susan Howe, Muriel Rukeyser, and the Scholar’s Art. She is also author of the poetry collection A Table That Goes On for Miles.
ERICA KAUFMAN is the Associate Director of the Institute for Writing & Thinking at Bard College. She is also the author of two full length poetry collections, censory impulse and INSTANT CLASSIC.
KRISTIN MORIAH is a doctoral candidate in English Literature at The Graduate Center, CUNY, researching African American literature and performance in transnational contexts. Born in Toronto, she lives in Brooklyn.
CONOR TOMÁS REED has been a student, educator, and activist at The City University of New York since 2006. Conor’s work focuses on 20th and 21st century Africana social movement literatures and freedom schools.
TALIA SHALEV is a PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and teaches at Brooklyn College. She studied writing at the University of Washington and Sarah Lawrence College. Her poems have appeared in The Seattle Review, and she co-founded the Other Means Reading Series, bringing New York City writers, readers, and community organizations together.
WENDY TRONRUD is a doctoral candidate in American Literature at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and teaches at Queens College. She has a Masters from Bard College and taught high school in NYC for a number of years. Her interests include American poetry, nineteenth century American Literature, and slavery studies.