We, at The Institute for Poetic Medicine, honor and celebrate poet Adrienne Rich and her life. Peace and Justice has lost a passionate and altogether courageous voice. She died on March 27, 2012, at the age of 82 in her Santa Cruz, California home. Her son, Pablo Conrad, reported that her death resulted from long-term rheumatoid arthritis. Her last collection was published the year before her death. Rich is survived by her sons and Michelle Cliff.
We are grateful for the deep service and example she provided to all who care about integrity, justice, peace, women's rights and human rights -- for standing up to and speaking out with
art and power in passionate response to oppression and oppressors.
Photo by Thomas Victor, 1974, from Presence
We appreciate the raw beauty of her poems and her wisdom in them regarding the significance of language and voice. We are moved in her poems by the weaving of the individual's perception and conscience into the penetrating energy of a natural world of seasons and change. She was able to hold a creative tension of political vision and mystery in all her writings.
Her meditations on silence are compelling, both what she had to say about oppressive silence:
"I am talking about the silence of a Lexan-sealed isolation cell in a maximum security prison, of evidence destroyed, of a language forbidden to be spoken, a vocabulary declared defunct, questions forbidden to be asked."
And also the silences of life-force and living presence:
"And yet I need to say here that silence is not always or necessarily oppressive, it is not always or necessarily a denial or extinguishing of some reality. It can be fertilizing, it can bathe the imagination, it can, as in great open spaces, I think of those plains stretching far below the Hopi mesas in Arizona - be the nimbus of a way of life, a condition of vision."
I often quote the above paragraph in programs and workshops and go further with this eloquent passage from her superb book, Arts of the Possible (CLICK HERE):
"The study of silence has long engrossed me. The matrix of a poet's work consists not only of what is there to be absorbed and worked on, but also of what is missing, desparecido, rendered unspeakable, thus unthinkable. It is through these invisible holes in reality that poetry makes its way - certainly for women and other marginalized subjects and for disempowered and colonized peoples generally, but ultimately for all who practice any art at its deeper levels. The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?"
