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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 girls
Adrienne Rich BiographyFrom the Encyclopedia of World Biography on Adrienne Richwww.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.1
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