Adrienne Rich
“When a woman tells the truth she is creating
the possibility for more truth around her.”
Adrienne Rich
Quiz#1
Adrienne Rich-Life and works
- Adrienne
Rich (Adrienne Cecile Rich) was born on Thursday, ______in
- Name
of Rich’s mother was___________.
3- Name of Rich’s father was_______.
4-Rich’s
father, the renowned pathologist Arnold Rice Rich, was a professor of medicine at
________ Medical School.
5-Rich’s
mother, Helen Jones Rich, was a concert ______until she married.
6-Rich
was the ____of two sisters.
7-Although
Arnold Rich came from a ____family the girls were raised as Christians.
8-She
attended the Radcliff
College
9-Adrienne
Rich was Born to a ______family
10-Rich
was educated by her parents until she entered public school in the_____.
11-In
1951 Rich’s first book of poems, A________, appeared.
12-_________and
Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
13-Rich
has published many essays on poetry, _______, motherhood, and lesbianism.
Quiz#2
Adrienne Rich’ quotable lines
Q: Identify the poem, in each case:
1. First having read the book of myths,/and loaded the camera,/and checked the edge of the knife-blade,/I put on/the body-armor of black rubber/
the absurd flippers/the grave and awkward mask.
2. it is a piece of maritime floss/some sundry equipment.
3. I crawl like an insect down the ladder/and there is no one/to tell me when the ocean/will begin.
4. First the air is blue and then/it is bluer and then green and then/black I am blacking out and yet/my mask is powerful/it pumps my blood with power
5. And now: it is easy to forget/what I came for/among so many who have always/lived here
6. I came to explore the wreck./The words are purposes./The words are maps.
7. I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
8. the thing I came for:/the wreck and not the story of the wreck/the thing itself and not the myth/the drowned face always staring/toward the sun
9. we are the half-destroyed instruments/that once held to a course/the water-eaten log/the fouled compass
10. We are, I am, you are/by cowardice or courage/the one who find our way/back to this scene/carrying a knife, a camera/a book of myths/in which/our names do not appear
11. They do not fear the men beneath the tree; /They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.
12. The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band/Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand.
13. The tigers in the panel that she made/Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.
Final Notations
- it will not be simple, it will not be long/it will take little time, it will take all your thought
- it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath/it will be short, it will not be simple
- it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart/it will not be long, it will occupy your thought/as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied/it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple
- it will be short, it will take all your breath/it will not be simple, it will become your will
- There are no angels yet/here comes an angel one/shut-off the dark/side of the moon turning to me/and saying: I am the plumbed/serpent the beast/with fangs of fire and a gentle/heart
- But he doesn't say that His message/drenches his body/he'd want to kill me/for using words to name him
- I sit in the bare apartment/Reading/words stream past me poetry/twentieth-century rivers/disturbed surfaces reflecting clouds
- Today again the hair streams/to his shoulders/the eyes reflect something/like a lost country or so I think/but the ribbon has reeled itself/up
- He isn't giving/ or taking any shit/We glance miserably /across the room at each other
- It's true there are moments/closer and closer together/when words stick in my throat/'the art of love'/'the art of words'
- just will you stay looking/straight at me/awhile longer
Quiz#1
Answer
Key
1- May 16, 1929
2- Helen Elizabeth Jones
3- Arnold Rich
4- Johns Hopkins
5- Pianist
6- Older
7- Jewish
8- 1951
9- middle-class
10- fourth grade
11- Change of World
12- The Diamond Cutters
13- feminism
Quiz#2
Answer Key
Adrienne Rich’s poetry
1-Diving into the wreck
2- Diving into the wreck
3- Diving into the wreck
4- Diving into the wreck
5- Diving into the wreck
6- Diving into the wreck
7- Diving into the wreck
8- Diving into the wreck
9- Diving into the wreck
10- Diving into the wreck
11-Aunt Jennifer’s tigers
12- Aunt Jennifer’s tigers
13- Aunt Jennifer’s tigers
14- Aunt Jennifer’s tigers
15- Aunt Jennifer’s tigers
16- Aunt Jennifer’s tigers
17- Aunt Jennifer’s tigers
18-Gabriel
19- Gabriel
20- Gabriel
21- Gabriel
22- Gabriel
23- Gabriel
24- Gabriel
Major Publications Adrienne
Rich
1951
A
Change of World. Rich's first volume
is selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
Auden states that her verses "speak quietly but do not mumble, respect
their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs."
1955
The
Diamond Cutters. Although critically praised,
Rich's second collection would be later dismissed by its author: "By the
time that book came out I was already dissatisfied with those poems, which seemed to
me more exercises for poems I hadn't written."
1963
Snapshots
of a Daughter-in-Law. Rich's collection marks a shift to free verse and an
emphasis on women's roles and a feminist-oriented consciousness.
1966
Necessities
of Life: Poems, 1962-1965. Rich's
collection of new works and translations of several modern Dutch poets is generally viewed as marking a
transition in her work to a more confrontational tone, exploring her personal
and political beliefs, experimental methods, and growing feminist
consciousness.
1969
Leaflets. Rich's collection
shows her increasing concern for social issues, including the Vietnam War, student unrest, and racial
violence. Her approach divides critics, some of whom see a decline in her art,
others a powerful new forcefulness.
1971
The
Will to Change. Thematically, the poems in this collection treat breaks in
relationships and in previous conceptions of self.
1973
Diving
into the Wreck. Rich's collection of
overtly feminist, frequently angry poems wins the National Book Award. Rich
accepts the award on behalf of all women and insists on sharing it with fellow
nominees Alice Walker and Audre Lorde.
1975
Poems:
Selected and New. Rich's collection is
described by the poet as "the graph of a process still going on,"
tracing her evolving gender ideas and the evolution of her poetical technique
from more formal structures to a looser, more personal style.
1976
Of
Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. Rich surveys motherhood from personal, anthropological, and
political perspectives to demonstrate her thesis that the social institution of
motherhood is a male construct designed to keep women under control.
1978
The
Dream of a Common Language. The
collection affirms women's power and place in history in poems treating various
historical figures, including Marie Curie and the mountaineer Elvira
Shatayev.
1979
On
Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978. This work collects Rich's essays and speeches dealing
with feminism and literature. It includes "Vesuvius at Home: The Poetry of
Emily Dickinson" and "When We Dead
Awaken," urging female self-determination.
1981
A
Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems, 1978-1981. The predominating
themes in this volume are anger and love. Critics single out Rich's best
poems--such as "For Julia in Nebraska" (a tribute to writer Willa
Cather)--for their matter-of-fact but
penetrating style.
1984 The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected
and New, 1950-1984. Rich's
collection explores perception and the forces of history. The same themes are
present in her next collection, Your Native Land
1989
Time's
Power.
As the title of her collection suggests, Rich is concerned with
history--especially in poems such as "Harpers Ferry"--and also in the individual
personal sense of time in works such as "Living Memory." Critics note
how she deftly swings from expressing her sense of political outrage to very
personal lyrics in poems such as "Letters in the Family," "One
Life," "Divisions of Labor," and "Turning."
1991
An
Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems, 1988-1991. The title poem in
Rich's thirteenth collection is a sequence cataloguing contemporary America through
images of survival, frustration, and marginality.
1993
What
Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics. Rich collects her
literary criticism, devoted mainly to commentary on newer,
mainly female writers.
1995
Dark
Fields of the Republic. Rich's
collection combines lyrical celebrations of women with large, sweeping odes
filled with the public voices of historical personages such as the political
activist Rosa Luxemburg, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt,
and Ethel Rosenberg, executed as a spy.
1999
Midnight Salvage:
Poems, 1995-1998. Rich's collection explores
the conflict between beauty and brutal contemporary reality and the challenge
of using language to evoke both. The poems are commended by Richard Howard, who
declares, "I know of no poetry by an American so charged with passion and solicitude for human life as it yields itself
to her attention, her judgment."
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