Adrienne Rich – Snopes

The Political in Poetry: Some Thoughts on White Privilege

Kiki Martire

These days it can be hard to tell the difference between what I am thankful for and simply privileges. I become more grateful each year for the opportunity to attend a top-notch liberal arts university, and to have the good fortune of family, education, home, food, and friends. Yet amid all I have to be thankful for this holiday season, it is my white A baseball cap and a portrait of Michael Brown is shown alongside his casket inside Friendly Temple Missionary Baptist Church before the start of funeral services in St. Louis privilege that hangs heaviest in my heart this week. Although Shenandoah is a place of literary rather than political debate, I would feel remiss to not mention Monday night’s announcement that the officer responsible for the death of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, will not be indicted. I think for most of the country grappling with this news a grim cloud looms over our Thanksgiving festivities. I know that personally my sense of American patriotism feels acutely heightened during this season of gratitude. But this year, it is hard for me to consider the United States a nation of prosperity and freedom, when so many of my opportunities are made possible by the chance color of my skin. In contrast, people of color are still denied full protection under the law and deprived of equal access to justice and dignity in their everyday lives.

In the wake of confusion or tragedy I often turn to poetry for wisdom and comfort. A brief Google search for “Ferguson poetry” led me to a blog posted on Tuesday by the Paris Review that featured Frederick Seidel’s brazenly entitled poem, “The Ballad of Ferguson, Missouri” that will appear in their winter issue next month. I was unpleasantly surprised to find that the poetic voice of “The Ballad of Ferguson” was a 78 year old white male, Harvard graduate, and the privileged son of a wealthy St. Louis family. Seidel has written about race complicatedly for decades, including horrifying descriptions of his father’s mistreatment of black servants growing up. His poetry is characterized by gaudy excesses of wealth and an unsettling engagement with social issues. Part of the “Ballad” reads:

Skin color is the name.
Skin color is the game.
Skin color is to blame for Ferguson, Missouri.

The body of the man you were
Has disappeared inside the one you wear.

I wouldn’t want to be a black man in St. Louis County.

While Seidel’s poem is certainly disturbing and thought provoking, it is also problematic in its approach. While some stanzas seem entrenched with complex meaning, other sections are concerningly oversimplified and steeped in emotional conflation. More to the point, the author is a white privileged male speaking as an outsider to Ferguson and the black community.

I much p images referred the poetic response of Danez Smith, a black-queer author and poet, with his debut collection [insert] Boy coming out this December. His poem, “not an elegy for Mike Brown” was featured in August by Split This Rock and later was performed as a slam poem in the 2014 Individual World Poetry Slam this October in Phoenix, AZ where Smith placed second. A particularly moving segment of the poem compares the violence of the Trojan war to reactions following Mike Brown’s death.

are we not worthy

of a city of ash? of 1000 ships
launched because we are missed?

always, something deserves to be burned.
it’s never the right thing now a days.

I demand a war to bring the dead boy back
no matter what his name is this time.

Not everyone will agree with Smith’s passionate and political response, but I respect his perspective and the quality of his poetry. Furthermore, I believe his approach is validated rather than biased because of his personal position within the conversation.

wild Recently I have been studying the work of Adrienne Rich, a prolific voice on social issues of gender and race. Her poem “Frame” (1980) took me by surprise with its power of sheer emotional provocation surrounding racial injustice. In the poem Rich omnisciently narrates the story of a female college student (presumably a woman of color) and the white male police officer who harasses and abuses her, wrongfully arresting her simply for waiting for a bus. Rich reminds the reader throughout the poem that she is not present in the scene but stands, “all this time just beyond the frame, trying to see.” Use of the anaphora, “in silence” towards the end of the poem emphasizes the complete lack of voice the female student has throughout her experience. The poem comes to a gripping end with the lines:

What I am telling you
is told by a white woman who they will say
was never there. I say I am there.

Here Rich confronts head on a dilemma I, and I suspect many more individuals, struggle with: as a white woman in America who can bear witness to everyday institutionalized racism, how do I speak on behalf of these atrocities? What role do I play? When I hear about incidents of racial injustice in America, and there are many, I feel the need to demonstrate in some way that, although I am white, I care about these massive abuses of power and support people of color trying to live their lives free from persecution. But I will never understand the experience of being black, cannot speak with authority on these issues, and do not wish to replace another’s voice with my own.

In “Frame” Rich acknowledg adrienne-rich es her station of privilege in the scene, being just outside the frame as a white woman. Yet she refuses to be squeezed out of the narrative completely and places herself in a position to care and report. She is not self-aggrandizing, but in her commentary Rich is removed from the shadows and reveals herself as an ally, claims her voice to speak with the oppressed and against the oppressors: “I say I am there.”

Over the last few days I have been disappointed by the silence of my white undergraduate peers whose voices are not speaking out about the Michael Brown case and the social issues that surround it. Perhaps, many are not affected and choose to not care, but I think another scenario is more likely. Many white people, especially young fellow students, seem to be afraid to speak up because they do not think it is their place and do not know how to approach the conversation. And I am not sure I do either, but I do know that writing can make a difference, and voices of support can be heard. I hope we can all consider the impact our voices and written word can have on the issues that matter most. I know I am thankful to have this platform to voice my opinion with dignity, and I wish for others to have the same.

Adrienne Rich 1929-2012

R.T. Smith

Adrienne Rich’s work so often demonstrates that poetry and politics are as close in nature as currents in a river. She began as a poet of strict measures and understatement (though already unwilling to be “mastered by” the ordeals inflicted upon women) and moved to an expansive vision of language as a “common dream” necessary but not sufficient in the quest to eradicate sexism and other bigotries. Her ingenuity, gravity and integrity has been the gold standard for more than one generation of poets. The following is a poignant statement about Rich from Washington and Lee poet and professor Deborah Miranda:

Adrienne Rich is one of those Ancestors who found me by accident, when I didn’t know I needed to be found. Another way to put this: she was one of those guides I was looking for (desperately) when I didn’t know I was looking. Either way, she caught me unawares and off-guard when I came upon her poetry in my mid-thirties, just as my life as a wife was ending and my official journey as a scholar and poet began. Rich was more than a role model for me (an intellectual who wrote poetry! a poet who was a mother! a feminist who was a lesbian!) – she was a rock on which I could set my feet and push outward, a validation of my dreams, a comfort, a holy terror to live up to. Indeed, she was a rock for many women in many ways. How were we so lucky to have her for so long? “No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone,” she wrote in Love Poem XVII, “The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, / they happen in our lives like car crashes/ books that change us, neighborhoods / we move into and come to love.” Yes, accidents happen – like the gift of coming to full womanhood with Adrienne Rich in the world. I believe in accidents.

Late Ghazal

Footsole to scalp alive facing the window’s black mirror.
First rains of the winter morning’s smallest hour.

Go back to the ghazal then what will you do there?
Life always pulsed harder than the lines.

Do you remember the strands that ran from eye to eye?
The tongue that reached everywhere, speaking all the parts?

Everything there was cast in an image of desire.
The imagination’s cry is a sexual cry.

I took my body anyplace with me.
In the thickets of abstraction my skin ran with blood.

Life was always stronger . . . the critics couldn’t get it.
Memory says the music always ran ahead of the words.

Reprinted from Dark Fields of the Republic (1995). Permission granted by the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

R. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995 and serves as Writer-in-Residence at Washington & Lee. His forthcoming books are Doves in Flight: 13 Fictions and Summoning Shades: New Poems, both due in 2017.

Political Agendas & Poetry

Timothy McAleenan

In class, Professor Smith briefly commented on the passing of the poet Adrienne Rich, noting how she was particularly adept at blending poetic discourse with political dialogue. Rich seems to be a straightforward example of how a poet incorporating politics into her poetry. But it seems that there is another trend that is often at play that affects whether or not a poet or poem becomes mainstream—the politics that the readership impute into the poem.

For instance, for a good portion of the 1800s and 1900s, Alexander Pope was the gold standard of poetry who occupied a central role in the discourse of any budding English scholar. An analysis of “The Rape of the Lock” was a basic “Introduction to English Poetry 101” element of any university curriculum for a large portion of the past three hundred years. However, that has slowly started to change over the past five to six decades, as many English scholars began to accuse Pope’s works of promoting sexism, as well as the inferior intelligence of women in comparison to men. Since most feminist interpretations of Pope’s work endorse the viewpoint of his sexism, Pope has gradually begun to recede from English curricula across the country due to his perceived sexism.

Of course, this plays out in the other direction as well. When William Wordsworth put out Lyrical Ballads, he chose to place Samuel Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” first in the original edition. Because most readers at the time were looking for straightforward language that depicted “emotion recollected in tranquility”, they were generally turned off by Wordsworth’s decision to include the clunky, archaic and oftentimes bizarre Mariner poem at the beginning. The contemporary politics at the turn of the century largely rejected Coleridge’s poem as an “injury to the volume”, but when we press the fast-forward button to 2012, we can see that Coleridge’s poem is the most enduring part of Lyrical Ballads, save for Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey.

Personally, I think it’s a shame that Alexander Pope will most likely have less notoriety in the year 2030 than he has today. My general approach to the politicization of authors (in identity politics) would be this—include the historically significant poems, and then have a conversation on their virtues and their failings. Instead of slowly removing The Rape of the Lock from the debate, I think we should continue to include it, and the detractors can use that opportunity to explain their objections to his work. If they are truly right, they ought to be able to make their arguments convincingly enough to persuade others.