Adrienne Rich began her long beatification in American letters at age 22, when her first collection won the 1951 Yale Younger Poets prize. A Change of World was a prescient title, for Rich, who died March 27 at 82, went on to lead a renaissance in women's writing. "My politics is in my body," she wrote decades later, well aware that she'd won the oppression trifecta--feminist, lesbian, Jewish. But she shouldn't be ghettoized as a political scribe.
I first fell in love with Diving into the Wreck (1973) in college for its carnality and canny use of metaphor as much as its ideology. Only three contemporary women poets graced the anthologies I was reading back then, and the other two were suicides.
Throughout the years, Rich remained ambivalent about prizes--accepting the MacArthur, the Bollingen and a National Book Foundation medal but refusing a 1997 National Medal of Arts in protest of certain Clinton Administration policies. Still, while hearing her 2006 NBF acceptance speech, I found myself scribbling one sentence onto scratch paper. It was a brisk, gorgeous blast at popular, decorative verse that insists on self-conscious frivolity. "Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy." For her it was life's blood--as she was to it, to us.
Karr is a poet and memoirist and the author of The Liars' Club