and yet, writing words like these ...

- By Michael Thurston

First, a friend posted on my wall a thumbnail of Edward Romanzo Elmer’s Mourning Picture. We have talked often about this painting, and about Adrienne Rich’s poem about it, but because I have not yet heard the news I’m not sure why Peter is reminding me of this. I’m about to reply with a question mark when another post appears, a headline from somewhere announcing that Adrienne Rich has died.

Elmer’s painting is strange, haunting. The painter depicts his recently deceased daughter, Effie, in the foreground, formally dressed, beside a lamb. She looks out of the frame and over the viewer’s shoulder into the distance. In the background, by a lilac, the grieving parents, dressed in black, sit, the father not looking at the newspaper in his lap, the mother ignoring the knitting in hers. In her poem about the painting, published in the 1966 collection, Necessities of Life, Rich captures the strangeness. She speaks from the point of view of the dead child and explores, from that defamiliarizing perspective, the ways we are bound by our bodies to the world, the ways those bonds are at once reinforced and dissolved by language. “I am Effie,” she writes. “I was your dream.”

The obituaries now making the rounds will sketch the facts of Rich’s long career: the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first book, published during her senior year at Radcliffe, along with a head-patting introduction by Auden; the radicalizing experience of acknowledging her lesbianism, and the radicalized poems that followed in the mid-sixties; the commitment to activism on the poetic page, to the poem as a textual act undertaken amidst and against a violently patriarchal culture; the masterpiece that was, that is, Diving into the Wreck, the poet’s award-winning 1973 volume; the continual production of powerful work as age and rheumatoid arthritis took their toll, and the thoughtfully, passionately analytical prose that taught us how to read not only Rich but poetry and culture in general. I’m caught up now less in these facts and summations than in the work that drew my hand, as if by gravity, as it hovered over her books on my shelves last night.

Because my first sustained reading of Rich’s work happened during a particularly fire-breathing moment of my youth, because the poems that meant the most to me then were the excoriations of American society’s misogyny and homophobia and racism and militarism, I assumed I’d be drawn again to poems like “Rape” and “Trying to Talk with a Man” and “The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message” and “Shooting Script.” Because I’d written fairly recently on “Diving into the Wreck,” because, with Peter, I’ve talked so often about “Mourning Picture,” I thought maybe those would pull me to them. Instead, though, I took down and reread Twenty-One Love Poems. That sequence is as political as anything Rich wrote, of course, and it calls our attention to the ways American society seems simply dangerous to subjects who live and love outside of its strict canons of acceptability. But it is also lovely, lyrical, erotic, gorgeous. Its “Floating Poem, Unnumbered,” limns sexual love with breathtaking beauty:

Whatever happens with us, your body
will haunt mine—tender, delicate
your lovemaking, like the half-curled frond
of the fiddlehead fern in forests
just washed by sun. Your traveled, generous thighs
between which my whole face has come and come—
the innocence and wisdom of the place my tongue has found there—
the live, insatiate dance of your nipples in my mouth—
your touch on me, firm, protective, searching
me out, your strong tongue and slender fingers
reaching where I had been waiting for years for you
in my rose-wet cave—whatever happens, this is.

More even than this, though, I have, last night and again and again this morning, found myself returning to the opening lines of the sequence’s seventh poem, which seems to me something of an ars poetica for this courageous and questioning, challenging and absorbing poet, and a fitting epitaph to have ringing in our mourning minds, an echo as we ache in her absence:

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
--and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living.