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The last time I read anything by Adrienne Rich (apart from
her widely-anthologised poem 'Diving into the Wreck') was twenty years ago,
when, as a new mother, I found my way to her feminist text Of Woman Born. I
loved the book - its tenderness, and intellectual fierceness, and ambition -
and the way Rich combined autobiography with social and historical analysis,
to issue this plea:
In arguing
that we have by no means yet explored or understood our
biological
grounding, the miracle and paradox of the female body and its
spiritual and
political meanings, I am really asking whether women cannot
begin at
last, to think through the body,
to connect what has been so cruelly
disorganized
- our great mental capacities, hardly used; our highly
developed
tactile sense; our genius for close observation, our complicated,
pain-enduring, multi-pleasured physicality.
A delight then, but no surprise, to find her now in her very late seventies
writing politically engaged poetry that is also visceral, tactile, full of
pain and pleasure. And in spite
of the cultural retrenchment she deplores in contemporary America, poetry
continues to present itself as a paradigm of what Rich was appealing for; a
way of reconnecting 'what has been so cruelly disorganized' - the
intellectual and sensual, the personal and political. The appeal remains
feminist, but carries its political and environmental burden more urgently
than ever.
Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth
is divided into 6 sections, and as has long been her practice Adrienne Rich
dates each poem by the year of its composition. A sprinkling of endnotes
refines the contextualization, and greatly amplifies the resonance of certain
poems. 'Calibrations' (2004) for
example has as end-note and sub-text Donald Rumsfeld's statement in December,
following the bloodiest battle of the Iraq war, that 'you go to war with the
army you have'. Describing a
prosthetic hand, and offering itself as 'A poem with calipers to hold a
heart/ so it will want to go on beating' Rich's lines
Ghost limbs
go into spasm in the night
You come back
from war with the body you have
reads powerfully both as statement and rebuke.
Strategically placed at the centre of Labyrinth is a collection of fragments entitled 'Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned
to Sender, or Judged Unfit to Send'. Taking as its epigraph the words of the
prosecutor sentencing Gramsci on June 2, 1928 - we must prevent
this mind from functioning - the poem
assumes the ongoing reality of cultural hegemony and at the same time honours
Gramsci's own resistance, combining quotes from his prison letters and
diaries with fragments written by 'various imaginary persons' to demonstrate
an unintimidated capacity for
passionate connection. The
paradigm is one of struggle in which freedom is continuously tested and
re-defined and it has specific stylistic implications: the writing must be
experimental, pushing its boundaries and asserting its freedoms at least
within the poet's own oeuvre.
So here in the space of a single poem Rich reduces an idea to a mathematical
formulation
History =
bodies in time-
or, in your language:
H= T
b
and lineates Gramsci's own exquisitely poetic prose; and writes with a tenderness and eroticism for which
the word is surely 'quick' in the Biblical sense - ie. the polar opposite of
dead.
But if 'Letters' is a kind of credo, as well as an offering up of
credentials, the collection as a whole is specifically a product of the years
in which Rich wrote it - the George Bush years, although his name is never
mentioned - of the Iraq war, Homeland Security, Hurricane Katrina and the
devastation of New Orleans, adding up to a sense of impending global
catastrophe that measures on every scale:
the city a
scar a fragment floating
on tidal
dissolution
The opal on
my finger
fiercely flashed till the hour it started to crumble
(from
'Voyage to the denouement')
Commentators have noted how throughout her career Rich has repeatedly torched
her own style. In the poem 'Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth' she insists
that this be understood as a response to the human predicament as she has
found it, and not confused with linguistic experiment or the escape of art
for art's sake:
Éa different
turn working
this passage
of the labyrinth
as laboratory
I'd have
entered, searched before
but that ball
of thread that clew
offering an
exit choice was no gift at all
For all its apocalyptic urgency and scope, this collection conveys awesome
humility as Rich looks back frequently over her life in the light of her political
commitment, and asks what has been achieved:
A room
papered with clippings:
newsprint in
bulging patches
none of them
mentions our names
gone from
that history then O
red
kite snarled
in a cloud
small plane
melted in fog: no
matter:
I worked to
keep it current
and
meaningful: a
job of living I thought
history as
wallpaper
urgently
selected clipped and pasted
but the room
itself nowhere
(from
'Wallpaper')
However, the bleak clarity of this and other poems in the collection (e.g.
'Draft#2006', 'Midnight, the same day', 'Re-reading The Dead
Lecturer') is matched by a persistent
basic faith in human beings and in language:
If the word
gets out if the word
escapes if
the word
flies if it
dies
it has its
way of coming back
The
handwritings on the walls
are vast and
coded
the music
blizzards past
And there are delightful and refreshing images in this book, accurate
observations, flights of fancy ('If/ as though') and a strand of laughter
running through, with one poem - 'Hotel' that strikes me as purely playful -
and a lot of recollected laughter, 'bed-laughter', and the laughter of shared
understanding that late-night conversation turns into.
If the collection does have a characteristic mode, it is that of montage -
Rich creating a sense of expanded connectedness not by writing about
connections, but by juxtaposing moments, glimpses, thoughts and feelings and
leaving the reader to make the running. The technique appears open,
non-prescriptive - but its conscious artfulness, even manipulation is not
shirked from either, and is held up for scrutiny. 'Director's notes' speaks
of keeping 'dislike' and 'boredom' as values, as deliberate risks, with the
intention that the audience will 'breathe a sigh, not so much relief/ as
finally grasping/ what all this was for'. As readers of this book we are invited to engage on every
level, becoming more aware in the process of our own position and responses.
In a Guardian article (November
18, 2006) Rich writes of
that in poetry which will not be grasped, which cannot be described,
which survives our ardent attention, our critical theories, our late-night
arguments. There is always (I am
quoting the poet/translator Americo Ferrari) 'an unspeakable where, perhaps,
the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides'.
Telephone ringing in the labyrinth
has such a nucleus. It is not a book one can read, or review, and then put
down and have done with. It is too reflective, too fierce, too engaging for
that, and on so many levels. A live call, hungry for connection, it just
won't stop resonating.
©
Meredith Andrea 2008
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