Radcliffe Gets Rich: Poet, Activist, Feminist Adrienne Rich Reads in the Radcliffe Institute Inaugural Lecture Series

The pews of the First Church in Cambridge overflowed with poets, feminists, scholars and literary enthusiasts alike Nov. 6, when renowned poet Adrienne Rich '51 read selections from her work as part of the Radcliffe Institute Inaugural Lecture Series. Rich has become one of the most influential writers of the contemporary women's movement, with volumes of poetry and prose that penetrate issues of politics, oppression, sexuality and race.

She shared her work as the third speaker in the series, which premiered April 28 with a lecture by Kathleen Sullivan, dean of Stanford Law School. With auspicious support from the institution formerly known as Radcliffe College, the Lecture Series celebrates Radcliffe's new mission as an Institute for Advanced Study.

Acting Dean of the Institute Mary Maples Dunn introduced Rich's reading by asserting that the lecture series represents the "breadth and depth of what the new Radcliffe Institute will maintain." The series aims to feature writers, scholars and professionals from a wide range of fields in the arts and sciences.

Rich, though perhaps unintentionally, proved to be the perfect poster girl for the revamped institution. Reflecting on her First year of 1947, Rich recalls a "lack of caring about the minds that inhabit a woman's body." It was an era during which, as Rich recalls, a woman scholar was a second-class citizen. She, however, emerged from the postwar university epoch as a distinguished scholar, graduating from Radcliffe with the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award.

Since then, Rich has published 19 volumes of poetry and four books of nonfiction prose, accumulating a list of accolades including two Guggenheim Fellowships (1952 and 1961), a MacArthur Prize, a National Book Award for Diving into the Wreck (1974; she accepted with Audre Lorde and Alice Walker in the name of all women who are silenced), the Fund for Human Dignity Award of the National Gay Task Force (1981), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1986) and, in 1996, the Academy of American Poets' Tanning Prize.

Rich's radical views and trailblazing courage were exemplified in 1997, when Rich turned down the National Medal for the Arts offered to her by President Clinton. In a letter printed in The New York Times, Rich wrote that "art..means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage... A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while people at large are so dishonored."

Such ideals, linked with her activism, outspoken feminism and writing talent distinguish Rich as both an author and historical figure. From a poem entitled "Greenwood," Rich's unwavering voice expressed her poetic ideals to her audience: "Poetry isn't revolution, but a way of knowing why it must come," she read.

Such notions of activist poetry evolved with a tumultuous life, marked with grave personal, artistic and political decisions. Rich's early poetry, though elegant, is politically lackluster, drawing thematically and stylistically on the works of poets like Yeats, Frost and Auden. Her "angrier" later works emerged from a vibrant background of marriage, family, 1960's civil rights activism, anti-Vietnam War protests, an emergent women's movement and personal decisions about sexuality and liberation.

In 1956, she began to date her poetry, which became laced with her trademark sexual politics and issues of oppression and freedom. After the 1970 death of her husband, Rich vocalized herself as an outspoken lesbian feminist, seeking to include the lesbian experience into woman's' scholarship. She remains today a figurehead for gay and lesbian rights, reproductive freedom and for the progressive Jewish movement.

Rich's return to Radcliffe after 50 years proved to be a celebration of both poetry and the Radcliffe Institution itself. Dean Dunn commented that Radcliffe would now serve as keepers of Rich's legacy, as her collected papers are archived at the Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger library on the History of Women in America.

The reading itself ranged from older poems like "Divisions of Labor" (which focuses on women in the back rows of politics) to works from her most recent publication, Midnight Salvage, and concluded with the poet sharing two new poems with the audience. Empathy for the troubles of the persecuted shone through the readings from Dark Fields of the Republic, as Rich's intimate voice, laden with strong pauses, directly addressed "the reader who still listens" to the politics of poetry. Shifting to works from Midnight Salvage, Rich read to rows of eyelids; listeners absorbed her words with eyes closed as she shared some of the underlying meanings of her new text.

Her latest work derives its title from the symbolic figure of Orion, whose presence frames the book's namesake poem, "Midnight Salvage." The eight-section poems run through pieces of Rich's past, focusing particularly on a college life that, according to Rich, was as "a cemetery is controlled." The morbid metaphor originates in this piece, which makes backhanded allusions to John Keats and Antonio Gramsci, who are buried in the same cemetery in Rome. Through Rich's instinctive search for the figure of Orion, listeners and readers voyage with the poet through a life of activism, looking through "history's bloodshot eyes" across "the pathetic erections of soothsayers," before establishing Rich as a poet and activist "practiced in life," who scans the fog for her midnight salvage.

One could argue that Rich's poetry was designed to be read aloud; double colons mark heavy caesuras in her work, rendering it a series of hypnotizing lines and pauses. Her riveting reading gives poem like "Seven Skins" (which focuses on dating a paraplegic in 1952) a cryptic tone as she reflects on the university and its change during the postwar years.

Rich's reading culminated with her sharing of two new works with the audience, coupled by an expletive prelude to her artistry. Modeled after the classic Italian form of tertza rhima (3-line triplets with elaborate end-rhymes), one of Rich's new works pays homage to Dante's Divine Comedy, which embodies this structure. Although it lacks end-rhymes, Rich's poem puts a twist on Dante's theme of the novice and the guide, ultimately celebrating what Rich terms "the death of history." She concludes that one's self is both novice and guide, as the poem's disembodied voice questions: "Was that youth? That clear sapphire on snow?"

Despite Rich's apparent discontent with the past, her work lauds the power of both history and words; words that merited a resounding standing ovation from the crowd gathered in Cambridge's Congregational Church. With such a warm embrace from her alma mater, Rich reiterated that Radcliffe has not, in fact, melted into Harvard, but stands as its own "mysterious" structure. In the poet's eyes, the Radcliffe Institute occupies a critical stance towards Harvard, serving as critique of modern elite universities and a "thorn in the flesh of institutional self-congratulation." The reading itself was another brick in the pathway of Radcliffe's future endeavors, and proves the dynamic nature of the Lecture Series.

Future speakers in the program include: Drew Gilpin Faust (who will assume the position of Dean of the Radcliffe Insitute on January 1, 2001) at the Agassiz Theatre, Feb. 6 at 3:30p.m; Toni Morrison in Sanders Theatre, April 3, 4p.m.; and Amartya Sen at the Agassiz Theater, April 24 at 4p.m.