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What is your response to Rich’s admissions and epiphanies? If you are a parent, or think about someday becoming a parent, can you relate to them? What parts of these readings did you respond to most strongly, either positively or negatively? Cite from the readings to support your response. I am a parent of three girls1 page dicussion 12 font double space
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Adrienne Rich Biography
From the Encyclopedia of World Biography on Adrienne Rich
www.bookrags.com/biography/adrienne-rich/Links to an external site. and
from The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United
States. www.english.illinois.edu/Maps/poets/m_r/rich/bio.htmLinks to an
external site.
Adrienne Rich (born 1929), perhaps more than
any other contemporary poet, crystallized in her work and life the deeply
complex, awakening consciousness of modern women. There is no writer of
comparable influence and achievement in so many areas of the
contemporary women’s movement. Over the years, hers has become one of
the most eloquent, provocative voices on the politics of sexuality, race,
language, power, and women’s culture. There is scarcely an anthology of
feminist writings that does not contain her work or specifically engage her
ideas, a women’s studies course that does not read her essays, or a poetry
collection that does not include her work or that of the next generation of
poets steeped in her example.
The daughter of Arnold Rich, a professor of medicine, and Helen, a trained
composer and pianist, Adrienne Rich described her early upbringing as
“white and middle-class … full of books, with a father who encouraged me
to read and write.” In 1951, the year Rich turned 22 and graduated Phi Beta
Kappa from Radcliffe College, A Change of World was published. Chosen by
W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Award, it was praised for “its
competent craftsmanship, elegance and simple and precise phrasing.” Rich
herself stated years later that being praised for meeting traditional
standards gave her the courage to break the rules in her more mature work.
Rich won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1952 and began studying in Europe
and England. In 1953 she married Alfred H. Conrad, a Harvard economist,
and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Two years later she gave birth to
her first child, David, and saw the publication of her second volume, The
Diamond Cutters and Other Poems, which received the Ridgely Torrence
Memorial Award.
In 1957 and 1959 two more sons, Paul and Jacob, were born, and Rich,
burdened already under the demands of motherhood, grew even more
frightened by the sense that she was losing her grip on her art and her self.
Those early years of motherhood are described with unflinching honesty
and vivid detail in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision,” an essay
in which she chronicles her anger, fatigue, and frustration as a young
mother who feared she had failed both as a woman and as a poet. As her
journal entries from these years reveal, this was an emotionally and
artistically difficult period; she was struggling with conflicts over the
prescribed roles of womanhood versus those of artistry, over tensions
between sexual and creative roles, love, and anger. Yet, in the late fifties
and early sixties, these were issues she could not easily name to herself;
indeed, they were feelings for which she felt guilty, even “monstrous,” and
for which there was as yet no wider cultural recognition, much less insight
or analysis.
Despite her fears Rich did continue to write, publishing Snapshots of a
Daughter-In-Law in 1963 and Necessities of Life, which won the National
Book Award, in 1966. By then Rich’s metamorphosis from housewife to
active feminist was underway, and many of her new poems were illustrating
that change. Gone were the traditional rhymed stanzas and the detached
tone. In their place a new, bolder language asserted itself, signaling a new
and bolder Rich who was no longer reluctant to deal with personal issues or
to express her outrage over social and political conditions. Poetry had
become for her a means of changing people’s ideas and attitudes about
themselves and their world.
In the late 1960s Rich moved to New York City with her husband and began
teaching at Swarthmore College, at the graduate school of Columbia
University, and then in the open admissions program at the City College of
New York. In 1969 Leaflets, a collection of poems about the political turmoil
of the 1960s, was published, and Rich’s reputation as an activist poet was
established.
Throughout the 1970s Rich’s work continued to reflect her deepening
commitment to feminism, to nature, and to social involvement. Her
collections The Will to Change (1971), Diving into the Wreck (1973),
and The Dream of a Common Language (1978) all deal in some sense with
these themes. Rich’s poetry has clearly recorded, imagined, and forecast her
personal and political journeys with searing power. In 1956, she began
dating her poems to underscore their existence within a context, and to
argue against the idea that poetry existed separately from the poet’s life.
Her poetry was honored with the National Book Award in 1974 for Diving
into the Wreck (which she accepted jointly with Alice Walker and Audre
Lorde in the name of all women who are silenced), two Guggenheim
Fellowships, the first Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the National Poetry
Association Award for Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry as well as
numerous other awards.
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, published in
1976, revealed another side of the poet. An historical and political study of
immense scope, the book confirmed her ability as a competent scholar and
researcher. Over the years, Rich taught at Swarthmore, Columbia, Brandeis,
Rutgers, Cornell, San Jose State and Stanford University. From 1976 until
her death in 2012, she lived with her partner, the writer and editor Michelle
Cliff.
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