POETICS AND PEDAGOGY

Adrienne Rich’s time teaching at City College during the late 1960s and early 1970s is a period that she returns to again and again in her writing about writing. It was during this time that Rich, surrounded by activists, came to feel “in the city, in the country at large—the ‘spontaneity of the masses’” and recognized this as “powerfully akin to the experience of writing poetry.”¹ The force of this recognition resonates throughout the body of Rich’s work; it marks, emphatically, the syllabi, exercises, and notes from Rich’s City College courses. These materials give substance to the beliefs that would come to animate Rich’s later, explicit statements on poetics—namely, that political activism and writing generate related forms of power and that poetry hinges on a delicate and necessary relationship between an “I” and a “we.”

For Rich, the power that political activism and writing generate takes root in acts of creation. Rich celebrates the power of such creative acts not only as it responds to other oppressive forms of power and limited understandings of politics, but also because she values the creative impulse itself. Rich’s writing exercises prioritize opportunities for creation; in the guidelines for one writing assignment, Rich tells students that, as they prepare their first drafts, “vitality, the flow of your ideas as they come, are the most important things... ” Rich frequently draws attention to students’ lived experiences as the stuff of creation, and the subjects Rich asks her students to describe in writing—“Going to the Movies” or “The Streets of Summer” or “an incident in which you felt fear,” for example—span and blur the lines between the everyday and the extraordinary. Throughout her teaching materials, Rich emphasizes that the act of description is meant to be not only analytic but generative, with an end that exceeds its creator: “In writing, we will be trying to define the actual experiences we ourselves are having, and to make others more aware of our reality as we perceive it.” [English 1-H] The writing exercises anticipate a claim Rich would later make in her essay “Woman and bird”: “Poetry and politics both have to do with description and with power.”²

Many of Rich’s teaching exercises, including those mentioned above, hinge not only on descriptive, but on imaginative acts. One exercise guides students to “get out” of their own subjectivity and identify themselves with a family member “enough to imagine how they would describe you.” These and other exercises, which call on students to draw both on their lived knowledge and their imagination of what others experience, carry with them a vital connection to Rich’s poetics; they rely on what “someone writing a poem believes in, depends on”—which is “a delicate vibrating range of difference, that an ‘I’ can become a ‘we’ without extinguishing others, that a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images. A language that itself has learned from the heartbeat, memories, images of strangers.”³

Rich’s syllabi and writing assignments work to construct a relationship between an “I” and a “we.” One can read in her teaching materials various assumptions about her students, which reflect her care not to ‘extinguish’ them as individuals. Among those assumptions is that students have power to recognize lies; that they have unique wants for themselves; that they can imagine their future; and that they can be authorities on where they live. Rich also continuously acknowledges her students as fundamental to the structure and meaning of her courses. In the course description for English 1-H, Rich writes that “the people in the class and their experiences will be the basic material of the course, about which we will be talking and writing.” This echoes Rich’s understanding of the kind of ‘common’ language poetry depends on.

In her meditation “To invent what we desire,” Rich addresses the question “what does a poet need to know?” What a poet needs to know, as Rich frames it, is strikingly similar to what Rich wants her students to know—and the stakes are similarly high. A poet should know that not everyone who feels the charge of poetry feels “licensed to write.”⁴ Students should know that while writing may not come naturally, “every person has important things to say, but often s/he is kept silent by the feeling that s/he ‘can’t put it into words’” [English 1-T]. A poet needs to know that “you yourself, through recombinations and permutations of the languages you already know, can recreate that fierce charge, for yourself and others, on a page, something written down that remains.”⁵ What Rich wants her students to know, as she makes explicit in the syllabus for a 1970 composition course, is that “writing can be for anyone a source of pleasure, self-knowledge and power.” [English 1-T]