How I’ve hated speaking “as a woman”
for mere continuation
when the broken is what I saw.
—Adrienne Rich, “Terza Rima,” Fox: Poems 1998-2000
he School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 is Adrienne Rich’s most recent volume. It follows Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998 (1999) and Fox: Poems 1998-2000 (2001). These volumes are not an attempt to produce an individual “masterpiece” but way-stations in a ongoing engagement with poetic language. “By 1956,” Rich writes in “Blood, Bread, and Poetry” (Arts of the Possible, 2001), “I had begun dating each of my poems by year. I did this because I was finished with the idea of a poem as a single, encapsulated event, a work of art complete in itself”:
I knew my life was changing, my work was changing, and I needed to indicate to readers my sense of being engaged in a long, continuing process. It seems to me now that this was an oblique political statement...It was a declaration that placed poetry in a historical continuity, not above or outside history.
Rich describes herself as “a writer in a country where native-born fascistic tendencies, allied to the practices of ‘free’ marketing, have been trying to eviscerate language of meaning” (“Arts of the Possible,” Arts of the Possible). As a poet, she says in “Blood, Bread, and Poetry,” she feels “more and more urgently the dynamic between poetry as language and poetry as a kind of action, probing, burning, stripping placing itself in dialogue with others out beyond the individual self.” Poetic language connects us “with all that is not simply whitechauvinist/
malesupremacist/straight/puritanical—with with what is ‘dark,’ ‘effeminate,’ ‘inverted,’ ‘primitive,’ ‘volatile,’ ‘sinister’”; it constitutes “writing...that may not be male, or white, or heterosexual, or middle-class.”
In her earliest encounters with poetry, Rich writes, “my...mind did not shut down for the sake of consistency”; later she came to realize that poetry “reasserts the claim to a complex historical and cultural identity, the selves who are both of the past and of tomorrow.” “We are,” she insists, “trying to build a political and cultural movement in the heart of capitalism”; at the same time she confesses to “the fragmentation I suffer in myself.” In reading Simone de Beauvoir and James Baldwin, Rich writes, “I began to taste the concrete reality of being unfree, how continuous and permeating and corrosive a condition it is, and how it is maintained through culture as much as through the use of force.”
What kind of writing is contained in The School Among the Ruins? Does the title refer metaphorically to poetry, which, Rich says, is “a kind of teaching” (“Blood, Bread Poetry”)? How does her complex vision of poetry connect to the actual poems she produces? In what way does her poetry assert “freedom” and not merely the ruminations of the individual self—or, worse, the ruminations of late Capitalism?
To begin with, Rich’s poems are by no means conventionally “clear.” The book opens with “Centaur’s Requiem”:
your hooves drawn together underbelly shoulders in mud your mane of wisp and soil deporting all the horse of you your longhaired neck eyes jaw yes and ears unforgivably human on such a creature unforgivably what you are deposited in the grit-kicked field of a champion tender neck and nostrils teacher water-lily suction-spot what you were marvelous we could not stand Night drops an awaited storm driving in to wreck your path Foam on your hide like flowers where you fell or fall desire
The poem is a puzzle piece which remains resonant—indeed, becomes more resonant—as one considers it, but never fully declares its “meaning.” A “centaur” is of course a creature from Classical mythology; the creature has the head, trunk and arms of a man and the body and legs of a horse. (The notion of such a creature may have arisen from an imperfect perception of men riding horses.) Since the poem is a “requiem,” this centaur must be dead—yet the poet seems to feel “desire,” tenderness towards it. The poem resembles Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” with its famous concluding line, “Du mußt dein Leben ändern” (“You must change your life”), so it is possible that Rich is looking at a statue of a centaur, perhaps one that has sunk into the mud of the “grit-kicked field” in which she encounters it.
In any case, the creature is, or has been, “marvelous”—an entity which seems to connect us to some realm of authenticity. Further—in a book whose title poem involves a “school” and teachers—Rich calls the centaur a “teacher.” Why does the centaur have long hair? Is this poem an oblique lament for the sixties or for the seventies—for a time of power? “The movements of the 1960s and the 1970s in the United States,” Rich writes in “Arts of the Possible” (1997), “were openings out of apertures previously sealed, into collective imagination and hope...They have been relentlessly trivialized, derided, and demonized by the Right and by what’s now known as the political center”:
I’ve been struck by the presumption, endlessly issuing from the media, in academic discourse, and from liberal as well as conservative platforms, that the questions raised by Marxism, socialism, and communism must inexorably be identified with their use and abuse by certain repressively authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century: therefore they are henceforth to be nonquestions.}
Is the centaur—still potent even in death—an emblem of “Marxism, socialism, and communism”? “Capitalism,” Rich goes on, “vulgarizes and reduces complex relations to a banal iconography.” What kind of “iconography” are we dealing with here? Is this a political poem? Is it a lament for a time in which “marvelous” creatures such as centaurs were freely imagined by humankind? Is it a lament for poetic fictions? And why does the creature cause desire? Isn’t Rich known to be a lesbian feminist? Why should she feel desire for a creature which is part man and part horse?
The questions I am raising here are not, in Rich’s term, “nonquestions” and they are not questions which can be easily or definitively answered—not something which can be handled by the talking heads on the evening news. Rich’s language deliberately moves us into a realm in which nothing is certain but which opens us to the process of questioning. In Capitalist society, she asserts, “everything...tends toward becoming a thing until people can speak only in terms of the thing, the inert and always obsolescent commodity” (“Arts of the Possible”). The centaur is a thing and it may be “obsolescent,” but it is not a commodity: it is a linguistic—or “poetic”—fiction; while it can be speculated about, it cannot in any way be “bought.” Indeed, its “being” is pure speculation: no one believes anymore that centaurs “really” exist in any form except poetic fictions, speculations, “possibilities” rather than “actualities.”
It is Rich’s great perception to realize that speculation itself is political—that “questioning” in a society in which “distinctions fade and subtleties vanish” (“Arts of the Possible”) is a political act. Her poem does not assert that Capitalist society is a bad thing; instead, it thrusts us into a realm in which questions, ideas—thought—arise. Further: it speculates about something which had power and which might yet be involved in some sort of resurgence. Like “Marxism, socialism, and communism,” the centaur is really nothing but a bundle of ideas, a myth. Can one “kill” a myth? The poem is fragmentary, incomplete—and we remember that Rich refers to her own feelings of fragmentation—but it points towards a wholeness which it cannot manifest. It stands, as Rich says, not as a piece of merchandise but as something “unforgivably human.”
The School Among the Ruins is full of poetry like that—a poetry of questioning and of struggle rather than what Rich calls “the sweetly flowing measures of my earlier books” (“Blood, Bread, and Poetry”). This is of course not to say that the book is necessarily difficult or “obscure.” There are a number of love poems in it, poems in which the poet turns away from heavy political questions to indulge herself in the sweetness of sentiment:
There’s a beat in my head song of my country called Happiness, U.S.A. Drowns out bouzouki drowns out world and fusion with its Get—get—get into your happiness before happiness pulls away... break out of that style give me your smile awhile (“This Evening Let’s” —a very amusing title)
There is also a fine tribute to French poet Guillaume Apollinaire and French songwriter Georges Brassens,
“After Apollinaire & Brassens”:
what flows under the Seine Mississippi Jordan Tigris Elbe Amazon Indus Nile and all the tributaries who knows where song goes now and from whom toward what longings
(Rich’s volume, Midnight Salvage has a beautiful, partial translation of Brassens’ song, “Chanson pour l’Auvergnat.”) 1/
One can follow themes of home (“and home no simple matter”—“Dislocations: Seven Scenarios”), innocence (“can I say it was not I listed as Innocence / betrayed you” — “Equinox”), and words (“the power to hurl words is a weapon,” “a word can be crushed like a goblet underfoot” — “Transparencies”) throughout The School Among the Ruins. There are also themes of change (“and we remain or not but not remain / as now we think we are” — “As finally by wind or grass”), of self-criticism (“Kid, you always / took yourself so hard!” — “To Have Written the Truth”; “Cut the harping... / You’re human, porous like all the rest” — “Tendril”) and of old age (“Palms flung upward: ‘What now?’ / Hand slicing the air or across the throat. / A long wave to the departing” —“Screen Door”). The phrase “not here yet” repeats. There is a play on the etymology of the word “conversion”: “You need to turn yourself around / face in another direction” — “Ritual Acts,” my italics). The title poem is an extremely powerful statement of the immense human cost of bombing other countries (“One: I don’t know where your mother / is Two: I don’t know / why they are trying to hurt us”): “Great falling light of summer,” Rich asks, “will you last / longer than schooltime?”
Perhaps the finest sequence of the volume—and the volume has far more “sequences” than it has “individual poems” —is “USonian Journals 2000.” The term “Usonian,” Rich explains, is “the term used by Frank Lloyd Wright for his prairie-inspired architecture. Here, of the United States of North America.” This section is in prose, but it is no less powerful for that. It touches on a subject dear to Rich’s heart—the nature of the oral:
Imagine written language that walks away from human conversation. A written literature, back turned to oral traditions, estranged from music and body. So what might reanimate, rearticulate, becomes less and less available. 2/
In her attempt to write “the history of the dispossessed” (“Blood, Bread, and Poetry”), Adrienne Rich is not attempting a chronicle of events so much as she is attempting to transform the dispossessed: “We need to begin changing the questions,” she writes (“Arts of the Possible”). The School Among the Ruins is a book full of questions, and it ends with still another question: “Not for her but still for someone?” The concluding stanza of the poem in which that line occurs begins,
She had wanted to find meaning in the past but the future drove a vagrant tank a rogue bulldozer rearranging the past in a blip coherence smashed into vestige
This experience of “coherence smashed,” of “the broken,” is a fundamental one for Adrienne Rich. She is fond of quoting a passage from James Baldwin: “Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety.” If chaos, incoherence, “the end of safety” is painful—the word Rich uses to describe her experience of it is “suffer” —it is also alive with possibilities. Her poetry is a constant affirmation of what Maria Mazziotti Gillan and Jennifer Gillan call “the unsettling of America”: “the constant erecting, blurring, breaking, clarifying, and crossing of boundaries that are a consequence of the complex intersections among peoples, cultures, and languages within national borders, which themselves are revised constantly” (Unsettling America). The study of history is not the study of a series of events whose meanings are fixed by executive decree of God or anyone else but the study of events whose intensity has erupted into possibility—into questions. The capacity to write poetry, Rich says, is “the capacity to hook syllables together in a way that [heats] the blood.” How does that heat—that alchemy—happen?
one syllable then another gropes upward one stroke laid on another sound from one throat then another never in the making making beauty or sense always mis-taken, draft, roughed-in only to be struck out is blurt is roughed-up hot keeps body in leaden hour simmering (“Tell Me”)
Poetry is “the school among the ruins” of Western history. (The word “school” conjures up Yeats, a favorite poet of Rich’s and someone who also associates poetry with “school” and “schools.”) But it is a school whose “teaching” is a curriculum of questions—and what is questioned is precisely the curriculum: “Can [I] say,” Rich asks in one poem, “I was mistaken?” (“Equinox”) The following beautiful lines, like Adrienne Rich’s work as a whole, are this poet’s answer to Robert Graves’ famous assertion (made in his poem, “To Juan at the Winter Solstice”), “There is one story and one story only.” Rich’s lines are a miniature ars poetica:
There is the story of the mind’s temperature neither cold nor celibate Ardent The story of not one thing only (“There is No One Story and One Story Only”) And again: No you can’t go home yet but you aren’t lost this is our school (“The School Among the Ruins”)
1. I confess to being somewhat puzzled by Rich’s assertion in The School Among the Ruins that “After Apollinaire & Brassens” is partly derived from Georges Brassens’ song “Le Pont des Arts.” I’m familiar with Brassens’ work but have no recollection of that title. There is “Le Vent,” which has
Center> Si par hasard, Sur l’ Pont des Arts Tu crois’s le vent, le vent fripon Prudenc’ prends garde à ton jupon. and “Les Ricochets,” which has ...On s’étonn’ra pas Si mes premiers pas Tous droit me menèrent Au pont Mirabeau Pour un coup d’chapeau À l’Apollinaire À l’Apollinaire but I’ve been unable to find anything called “Le Pont des Arts.”
2. In “Blood, Bread, and Poetry” Rich writes, “I should add that I was easily entranced by pure sound and still am, no matter what it is saying; and any poet who mixes the poetry of the actual world with the poetry of sound interests and excites me more than I am able to say.”