two whole days off in LA! much laying about in the hotel. but I did have to write something for tonight's debut of the new "Raising the Red Tent" format tonight at Bar 13, so I'll post that here. and now I have to go pack -- super annoying thing: I check out of this hotel today, fly to Fresno, come back and check BACK INTO THE SAME HOTEL tomorrow night. Ridiculous! I'm not absolutely certain this rambling on Adrienne Rich makes sense, but here it is:

Because the interior world is both fragment of and sculptor of both the immediate and far
exterior world – politics, the other, struggle, evidence of hunger – Adrienne Rich's poems dwell on the backs of eyelids as well as the barrels of submachine guns. Which is to say, her concern for the world as a troubled and bellicose place does not eclipse, but rather deepens her concern for the life of the body/self/mind –

“And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds
break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,
and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.”
(poem IV, Twenty-One Love Poems)

For me, Rich's poems (and essays) serve as a reminder that we are only irrelevant if we decide to be so – that at the very least, the act of writing out of silence, of breaking the blank page with the closest words we have to truth (“what in fact I keep choosing / are these words, these whispers, conversations / from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green”), brings us closer to the better world we dream of creating. That words create reality – and that with this constant attempt to voice change into being, to disrupt the status quo that keeps us divided and fighting, comes a concurrent dedication to disrupting the known or expected form of poetry itself.

Seeing Adrienne Rich read at Barnard last year, from a sheaf of papers containing new, unpublished work – she who could rest easily secure on reputation and merit, never writing another poem – seeing her still plowing and sowing new ground stylistically, still reaching to new subjects and objects, still indicting both self and the world – taught me, as her work does, that we invent ourselves and the world word by word. That craft is the beginning, meaning the middle, and the end beyond our ability to know.

XIII(Dedications),
from An Atlas of the Difficult World

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a gray day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plain's enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the Intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
betweeen bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.