Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition / Edition 2

by Adrienne Rich, Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, Albert Gelpi, Brett C. Millier

Overview

“This absolutely exquisite selection of a major poet’s best poetry is a tribute to both her and the editors as well as a deep service to literate humanity.” —ALBERT WACHTEL, Pitzer College

“I do use your edition of Rich each time I teach my women writers course. It’s essential!” —JOELLEN DELUCIA, Central Michigan University

This Norton Critical Edition includes:

• Generous selections of poetry and prose from the entire oeuvre of one of America’s most influential poets.
• An introduction and explanatory annotations by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi, Albert Gelpi, and Brett Millier.
• Fifteen reviews and critical commentaries, nine of them new to the Second Edition, carefully chosen as a guide to Adrienne Rich’s poetics—and to her poetics as related to politics—ranging from W. H. Auden’s 1951 response to her first book to critics’ reviews of the magisterial Collected Poems in 2016.
• A Chronology, a Selected Bibliography, and an Index.

About the Series

Read by more than 12 million students over fifty-five years, Norton Critical Editions set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers. The three-part format—annotated text, contexts, and criticism—helps students to better understand, analyze, and appreciate the literature, while opening a wide range of teaching possibilities for instructors. Whether in print or in digital format, Norton Critical Editions provide all the resources students need.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393265439
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/01/2018
Series:	Norton Critical Editions Series
Edition description:	Second Edition
Sales rank:	1,057,209
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major public intellectual of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry, including the National Book Award–winning Diving into the Wreck, and more than a half-dozen of prose.

Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi is Professor of English at Stanford University, where she has taught since 1968. She is the author of Shelleyís Goddess: Maternity, Language, Subjectivity and Dark Passages: The Decadent Consciousness in Victorian Literature, as well as numerous articles on, mainly, feminist and psychological literature. She is an editor of several important volumes, including Feminist Theory: A Critique of Ideologies and Women and Poverty.

Albert Gelpi is William Robertson Coe Professor of American Literature at Stanford University, where he has also taught since 1968. His books include Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet, The Tenth Muse: The Psyche of the American Poet, and, most recently, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance, 1910-1950. He is the editor of Wallace Stevens: The Poetics of Modernism and Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism and for a decade edited Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture.

Brett C. Millier is the Reginald L. Cook Professor of American Literature at Middlebury College. She is the author of Elizabeth Bishop: Life and the Memory of It, and Flawed Light: American Women Poets and Alcohol. She is also associate editor of The Columbia History of American Poetry.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

Acknowledgments xiv

A Note on the Text xiv

Poetry 1

Photograph: Adrienne Rich, 1974 2

From a Change of World (1951) 3

Storm Warnings 3

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers 4

The Uncle Speaks in the Drawing Room 4

From the Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955) 6

Living in Sin 6

The Diamond Cutters 7

From Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems 1954-1962 (1963) 9

The Knight 9

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law 10

A Marriage in the 'Sixties 14

The Roof walker 16

From Necessities of Life: Poems 1962-1965 (1966) 17

Necessities of Life 17

The Trees 19

Like This Together 20

After Dark 22

"I Am in Danger-Sir-" 24

Focus 25

Face to Face 26

From Leaflets: Poems 1965-1968 (1969) 27

Orion 27

5:30 A.M. 28

On Edges 29

Nightbreak 30

From the Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970 (1971) 32

Planetarium 32

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children 34

I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus 37

Our Whole Life 38

A Valediction Forbidding Mourning 39

From Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 (1973) 40

Trying to Talk with a Man 40

The Stranger 41

Diving into the Wreck 42

The Phenomenology of Anger 44

For the Dead 49

From a Survivor 49

From Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974 (1975) 51

The Fact of a Doorframe 51

From an Old House in America (sections 1-7, 13-16) 52

From the Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 (1978) 59

Power 59

Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev 60

Twenty-One Love Poems 62

Transcendental Etude 72

From a Wild Patience has Taken Me This Far: Poems 1978-1981 (1981) 77

Integrity 77

Transit 79

For Ethel Rosenberg 80

From Your Native Land, Your Life: Poems (1986) 84

Sources 84

North American Time 98

Poetry: I 101

Poetry: III 102

Yom Kippur 1984 103

Contradictions: Tracking Poems: 6, 7, 18, 29 107

From Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988 (1989) 109

Solfeggietto 109

Delta 112

6/21 112

Dreamwood 113

From an Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991 (1991) 114

An Atlas of the Difficult World (sections I-IV, XIII) 114

Tattered Kaddish 122

Final Notations 123

From Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (1995) 124

Calle Visión 124

Take 130

From Piercéd Darkness 131

From Midnight Salvage: Poems 1955-1998 (1999) 134

Midnight Salvage 134

Camino Real 138

Seven Skins 141

From Fox: Poems 1998-2000 (2001) 144

Fox 144

Terza Rima 145

Waiting for You at the Mystery Spot 151

From the School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 (2004) 153

Centaur's Requiem 153

Equinox 154

Tell Me 155

The School Among the Ruins 156

Memorize This 159

From Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems 2004-2006 (2007) 161

Calibrations 161

Archaic 162

Long After Stevens 163

From Tonight no Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010 (2011) 165

Waiting for Rain, for Music 165

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve 166

Axel Avákar 167

Axel Avákar 167

Axel: Backstory 167

Axel, In Thunder 168

I Was There, Axel 169

Axel, Darkly Seen, In a Glass House 170

Powers of Recuperation 172

From Later Poems: Selected and New 1971-2012 (2013) 176

Endpapers 176

Prose 179

Photograph: Adrienne Rich, 1987 180

[Poetry and Experience: Statement at a Poetry Reading] (1964) 181

When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision (1971) 182

Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson (1975) 193

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980) 212

Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity (1982) 234

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet (1984) 250

The Genesis of "Yom Kippur 1984" (1987) 264

Adrienne Rich: An Interview with David Montenegro (1991) 269

From What Is Found There (1993, 2003) 285

I Woman and bird (1993) 285

XIII Beginners (1993) 288

XXI The distance between language and violence (1993) 296

XXII Not how to write poetry, but wherefore (1993) 301

XXIII "Rotted names" (1993) 305

XXIX Six meditations in place of a lecture (2003) 311

Foreword to Arts of the Possible (2001) 327

Permeable Membrane (2005) 333

Reviews and Criticism 337

Photograph: Adrienne Rich, 2000 338

Foreword to A Change of World W. H. Auden 339

Review of Diving into the Wreck Margaret Atwood 341

Ghostlier Demarcations, Keener Sounds Helen Vendler 343

"Reconstituting the "World": The Poetry and Vision of Adrienne Rich Judith McDaniel 355

Review of The Dream of a Common Language Olga Broumas 367

Philoetetes Radicalized: "Twenty-One Love Poems" and the Lyric Career of Adrienne Rich Kevin McGuirk 374

Re-Forming the Cradle: Adrienne Rich's "Transcendental Etude" Jane Hedley 397

Singing America: From Walt Whitman to Adrienne Rich Peter Erickson 417

The "Possible Poet": Pain, Form, and the Embodied Poetics of Adrienne Rich in Wallace Stevens' Wake Cynthia Hogue 431

Adrienne Rich Eavan Boland 441

The Language of Witness: Adrienne Rich Albert Gelpi 444

Postscript 2016 Albert Gelpi 457

Boundary Conditions [Review of Collected Poems] Dan Chiasson 459

[The Poetic Is Political: Review of Collected Poems] Wayne Koestenbaum 465

"A Life Written in Invisible Ink": Adrienne Rich's Collected Poems Sandra M. Gilbert 468

A Chronology Adrienne Rich 475

Selected Bibliography 479

Index of Poem Titles and First Lines 483