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Adrienne Rich Biography |
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Adrienne Rich (born May 16, 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland, Maryland) is an United States feminist, poet, teacher, and writer.
In 1951, the year she graduated from Radcliffe College, Adrienne Rich received the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, which led to the publication of her first book, A Change of World. The contest judge for that year, poet W. H. Auden, wrote a patronizing introduction to this volume, stating that the poems "are neatly and modestly dressed, speak directly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs." The following year, she received a John_Simon_Guggenheim_Memorial_Foundation Fellowship and traveled to Europe, then married Harvard University economist Alfred H. Conrad in 1953. Two years later, she published her second volume, The Diamond Cutters, yet it wasn't until her third volume, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, which appeared in 1963, that she gained national prominence, in part because of the accomplishment of her lyric voice, mostly in free verse, and in part because of her treatment of feminist-related themes. In 1966, she moved with her family, which now included three sons, to New York City, and became increasingly involved in the sociopolitical activism of the day. Her books from this period, Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and Will to Change (1971), reflect an evolving, expanding sense of poetic form and social engagement. In 1969, she became estranged from her husband, who committed suicide the following year. Rich became active in the women's liberation movement from this point forward. In 1974, her collection Diving Into the Wreck receivved the National Book Award for Poetry; Rich, however, refused the award individually, instead joining with two other female poets to accept it on behalf of all silenced women. Rich's militant feminist position crystallized in her self-declaration as a lesbian, in 1976, the year she published her controversial but groundbreaking volume Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution; the pamphlet Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), which was incorporated into the following year's Dream of a Common Language (1978), marks the first direct treatment of lesbian desire and sexuality in her work. The subsequent A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and some of the late poems in The Fact of a Doorframe (1984) represent the capstone of this philosophical and political position. During this period, Rich also wrote a number of important essays, including "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence," some of which were republished in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (1979). Rich's poetry of the 1980s and 1990s cast a broader net, once again exploring the themes of the late 1960s and early 1970s, but with greater acuteness and range. The award-winning volume An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) in particular map out discursive spaces engaging private and public histories, and offer powerful examples of ethically engaged, socially committed lyric poetry. Rich refused the National Medal of Arts in 1997 stating that "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration." Another quote from the same speech outlines her view of poetry: "Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage." In February of 2003, Rich, along with other poets, in protest of the Iraq War, refused to attend a White House symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice."http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/49/ Among her many awards are the 1997 Wallace Stevens Prize of the Academy of American Poets and the 2004National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for School Among the Ruins. Bibliography See also 
Courtesy of: http://www.wikipedia.org/ |
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