The American Political
and Social Context
The period of the
middle 1960s and 1970s was a time of dramatic change in American society.
“Political protests helped make available to literature a broad range of
insistent voices…[and produced] a much broader awareness of imaginative
expression by a wide range of literary talent…. In both fiction and poetry
writers found present-day life could be described with a new frankness and
expanded awareness appropriate to women’s wider and more egalitarian role in
society” (Klinkowitz & Wallace, 2007, p. 2090). In the mid 1960s and 1970s
the Black Arts movement, related to the Black Power movement, saw the emergence
of writers such as LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Sonia Sanchez, Ntzoake Shange,
and Nikki Giovanni who wrote political, often angry, poems. Toni Morrison
became a senior editor at Random House and in that role helped to get important
work by AfricanAmerican writers such as Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones
published. Morrison herself would soon begin to write powerful novels
dispelling myths about American history as they depict the lives of
African-Americans.
The New Left agitated
for loosening of drug laws, an end to the Vietnam War, gay rights, and abortion
rights. University students and teachers held “teach-ins” exploring various
aspects of American politics. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was
founded in 1966. The Civil Rights movement continued to press for equal rights.
These political, cultural, and social currents would impact Rich and change her
poetry and her life. She participated in anti-war protests and held classes in
her home when student protests shut down Columbia University where she was
teaching.
John Ashbery writes
“Adrienne Rich is a traditional poet, but not a conventional one. She has made
progress since those schoolgirlish days…. She emerges as a kind of Emily
Dickinson of the suburbs…. Hard and sinewy new poetry” (in Cooper, pp.
217–218). Reviewing Ashbery’s words Werner comments that both Dickinson and
Rich are “more subversive than suburban” (Werner, p. 8). Many critics find this
book better than Rich’s previous work. Helen Vendler, for one, praises this
book for its greater subtlety (1973, Parnassus, reprinted in Gelpi &
Gelpi). Ironically, Rich’s subtlety is gained at the price of denial, for in
order to achieve it she must subdue anger and other powerful, troubling feelings.
The faults that Vendler believes mar this book are the other face of the
subtlety she admires. Vendler decries Rich’s occasional lapses into resignation
and excessive reliance on literary allusion. Yet these strategies are the mark
of Rich’s distance from the feelings in the poems.
Necessities of Life
Piece by piece I seem
to re-enter the world:
I first began
A small, fixed dot, still see
that old myself, a dark-blue thumbtack
pushed into the scene,
a hard little head protruding
from the pointillist’s buzz and bloom.
After a time the dot
begins to ooze.
Certain heats
melt it.
Now I
was hurriedly
blurring into ranges
of burnt red, burning green,
whole biographies swam up and
swallowed me like Jonah.
Jonah! I was
Wittgenstein,
Mary Wollstonecraft, the soul
of Louis Jouvet, dead
in a blown-up photograph.
Till, wolfed almost to shreds,
I learned to make myself
unappetizing. Scaly
as a dry bulb
thrown into a cellar
I used myself, let nothing use me.
Like being on a private dole,
sometimes more like kneading bricks in Egypt,
What life was there, was mine,
now and again to lay
one hand on a warm brick
and touch the sun’s ghost
with economical joy,
now and again to name
over the bare necessities.
So much for those days.
Soon
practice may make me middling-perfect, I’ll
dare inhabit the world
trenchant in motion as an eel, solid
as a cabbage-head. I
have invitations:
a curl of mist streams upward
from a field, visible as my breath,
houses along a road stand waiting
like old women knitting, breathless
to tell their tales.
The title poem,
“Necessities of Life” develops the book’s recurring pattern of loss and
restoration, death and rebirth, in human and vegetable terms. It describes a
mother’s desperate attempt to preserve her identity. The speaker feels torn by
others’ expectations of her. She withdraws, learning to survive underground as
a tuber. Here, she may explore her inner darkness and undergo rebirth. The poem
begins with the speaker’s birth, and moves through her avid reading as an
adolescent, her intense identification with the historical figures in the books
she read.
Vendler’s reading of
this poem is useful. She notes that Rich is able to speak vividly about her
passionate adolescent loss of self through immersion in the lives she reads
about. Yet there is a “hiatus” in the poem where the poet is unable to discuss
the “other – devouring of marriage and child – rearing,” the personal pain
which is too close to examine (Vendler in Gelpi & Gelpi, 1993, p. 306).
Faced with incessant demands, the speaker feels herself disappearing. To
protect the inner kernel of selfhood she retreats to the basement. In this
intense imagery of entrapment, the speaker, in selfdefense, chooses
incarceration in the cellar. But she collects her forces and plans to reenter
the world. To describe this return she uses the imagery of the cabbage and eel
which she terms “solid” and moving. They are sexless, nonhuman. There is also
animage of houses imagined as old women which seem ready to welcome her and
tell their stories. The poet herself has more tales she is eager to tell.
Vendler comments perceptively on the poem’s conclusion: But where is the new
society to join, when child–bearing is over? Where but among the old wives?…In
these lines acquiescence and rebellion compete; the…girl who dreamed of being
Wittgenstein should join the garrulous crones. And yet, what else can the
normal lot be; …Is it not enough to sit on the doorstep and knit? That was as
far ahead as Rich could see in 1962. (Vendler in Gelpi & Gelpi, 1993, p.
307) Until she can see a better way to reenter the world, the speaker chooses
the nonhuman identity of cabbage or eel, or the role of a knitting woman.
Reading the poem in light of her later work, Craig Werner finds that Rich
“concentrates on the conditions that will make reentry into the world possible
for women whose previous attempts to assert themselves in love and marriage
failed” (1988, p. 23)
Source: Adrienne Rich: Challenging Authors by Karen F. Stein