Phoenix Living Poets S.
4 total works
The themes of this book are the poetics of violence and the poetics of love. Its impulse is the deepening of recognitions through language, in a time of ignorance and mutilation.
Miss Rich has written: "For a poet...there is this primary labor with words. But I have the notion that how you live your life has something to do with it-that morality, for a poet, is a refusal of blinders, of traditional consolations, a courage to be alone, or wounded....A willingness to step out into the fog, to take paths which may lead nowhere. Certainty, predictability, are the first supports that have to go. I see the poetry of things as standing in resistance to brute mechanistic force, the charge of the rhinoceros with its head down. To discover-literally-this poetry and re-create it in language is a poet's essential action."
Miss Rich has written: "For a poet...there is this primary labor with words. But I have the notion that how you live your life has something to do with it-that morality, for a poet, is a refusal of blinders, of traditional consolations, a courage to be alone, or wounded....A willingness to step out into the fog, to take paths which may lead nowhere. Certainty, predictability, are the first supports that have to go. I see the poetry of things as standing in resistance to brute mechanistic force, the charge of the rhinoceros with its head down. To discover-literally-this poetry and re-create it in language is a poet's essential action."
Author of more than thirty books, Adrienne Rich was the singular voice of her generation, bringing discussions of gender, race and class to the forefront of poetical discourse. Selected Poems offers a full and representative selection of poems from the whole of Rich's long and distinguished career. The volume encompasses her best-known work-the clear-sighted and passionate feminist poems of the 1970s, including "Diving into the Wreck", "Planetarium", and "The Phenomenology of Anger"-and offers the full range of her evolution as a poet. From poems leading up to her feminist breakthrough through bold later work such as "North American Time" and "Calle Vision", Selected Poems expresses the vital dialogue between Rich's personal experiences and political views. As the editors explain in their introduction, Selected Poems presents the complete picture of Rich's powerful and deeply moving poetry, as well as the evolution in poetic forms that trace her radical vision.
First published in 1963, this book is now restored to print in a new edition containing some revisions and one hitherto unpublished poem.
"The Will to Change must be read whole: for its tough distrust of completion and for its cool declaratives which fix us with a stare more unsettling than the most hysterical questions...It includes moments when poverty and heroism explode grammer with their own dignified unsyntactical demands...The poems are about departures, about the pain of breaking away from lovers and from an old sense of self. They discover the point where loneliness and politics touch, where the exercise of the radical courage takes its inevitable toll."—David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review