Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry

by Adrienne Rich, Sandra M. Gilbert (Editor)

Overview

A New York Times Critics’ Pick


A career-spanning selection of the lucid, courageous, and boldly political prose of National Book Award winner Adrienne Rich.

Demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision, Essential Essays showcases Adrienne Rich’s singular ability to unite the political, personal, and poetical. The essays selected here by feminist scholar Sandra M. Gilbert range from the 1960s to 2006, emphasizing Rich’s lifelong intellectual engagement and fearless prose exploration of feminism, social justice, poetry, race, homosexuality, and identity.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393355130
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	08/20/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	373,367
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.20(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.

Sandra M. Gilbert is a distinguished literary critic, professor, and poet. She lives in Berkeley, CA.

Table of Contents

A Note on the Text ix

Introduction: The Treasures That Prevail xi

On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978

When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision (1971) 3

Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman (1973) 20

Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson (1975) 39

Uncollected

Poetry and Experience: Statement at a Poetry Reading (1964) 71

From Caryatid: A Column (1973) 73

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976)

Foreword 79

Anger and Tenderness 85

Motherhood and Daughterhood 107

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985

What Does a Woman Need to Know? (1979) 149

Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence (1980) 157

Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity (1982) 198

The Eye of the Outsider: Elizabeth Bishop's Complete Poems, 1927-1979 (1983) 218

Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet (1984) 228

What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993, 2003)

Woman and Bird 249

Voices from the Air 253

The Distance Between Language and Violence 257

Not How to Write Poetry, but Wherefore 264

"Rotted Names" 270

A Poet's Education 278

Tourism and Promised Lands 285

Six Meditations in Place of a Lecture 291

Arts of the Possible (2001)

Muriel Rukeyser: Her Vision (1993) 313

Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts (1997) 319

Arts of the Possible (1997) 326

A Human Eye (2009)

Permeable Membrane (2005) 347

Poetry and the Forgotten Future (2006) 350

Notes 369

Credits 389

Index 395

Editorial Reviews

A peerless pleasure.

New York Times

Reading [Essential Essays], one is struck by the breadth of Rich’s research, the force of her arguments, the elegance and honesty of her personal writing.”

Bookforum

An excellent guide to living for anyone invested in the feminist struggle today, or the struggle for self-determination and equality more broadly.

Pacific Standard

[Essential Essays] shows us a woman in full command of her intellect and art.… [Rich] is more relevant than ever.”

San Francisco Chronicle

This collection refreshes an esteemed opinion of Rich’s invaluable contributions to poetry and feminist thought.

New York Journal of Books

Rich offers a powerful reminder of the continuous self-reflection required to fight ignorance—one's own and others'.… A profound and beautiful call to think, and feel, and fight.

New York Times Book Review

[Essential Essays] shows us a woman in full command of her intellect and art.… [Rich] is more relevant than ever.

San Francisco Chronicle

I don't mean to claim some instant, magic woke-ness upon reading [Essential Essays and Selected Poems: 1950-2012]. But Rich offers me a powerful and necessary reminder of the continuous self-reflection required to fight ignorance—one's own and others'…These two volumes will be the gateway to Rich's pivotal body of work for the coming generation of readers. They will find a piercingly clear and authoritative voice in both poetry and prose, able to assert itself on seemingly any topic, which will serve as a model for inaugurating and explaining future paradigm shifts. They will find what were once new ideas that are now commonplace, in part thanks to Rich. They will find, in a little more than 800 pages, a summation of one of the great careers in American letters, a profound and beautiful call to think, and feel, and fight.

The New York Times Book Review - Craig Morgan Teicher

For [Rich], a thinking life, a political commitment, does not mean achieving perfect awareness—call it wokeness or whatever else—but embarking on "a long turbulence." It is a perpetual "moving into accountability," never an arrival…It's not intimacy that these pieces afford; as much as Rich tells us, there is more that she conceals, especially about her private life…But it is a peerless pleasure to join her in the "long turbulence," to think alongside her. I once read that a blue whale's arteries are so large that an adult human could swim through them. That's what entering these essays feels like—to flow along with the pulses of Rich's intelligence, to be enveloped by her capacious heart and mind.

The New York Times - Parul Sehgal

04/16/2018
This vibrant collection of prose pieces by the late poet Rich (1929–2012), edited by Gilbert (Reading and Writing Cancer), spans much of Rich’s career, from 1964 to 2009, and encompasses her ideas on art, motherhood, and politics—and the relationship between them. Topics also include the literary: Rich writes eloquently, for example, about Charlotte Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens. More political themes are sounded in 2001’s “Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts” and 1979’s “What Does a Woman Need to Know?” which exhorts Smith graduates not to lose their “outsider’s consciousness” in a patriarchal society. Throughout the collection, which traces Rich’s evolution as artist and activist, Rich never wavers from her view that art is political, even when ostensibly apolitical, and that the personal is political. Some especially prescient selections articulate, in the 1980s and ’90s, problems of racism, violence, and wealth inequality that have only recently more fully penetrated the national consciousness. Her strongest essays, such as 1997’s “Arts of the Possible,” pull together her critique of neoliberalism’s “drive to disenfranchise and dehumanize” countered by art’s capacity to embrace the fully human. Her essays, always provocative, clear, and packed with insights, are wise, refreshingly humane, and well worth reading. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

08/01/2018
Renowned for her poetry and feminist leadership, National Book Award winner Rich (1929–2012) also created an extensive body of prose work. Among the essays collected here, many published during the author's lifetime, are reviews of other famous literary works, feminist and lesbian critiques, and commentary on the politics marking the third quarter of the 20th century. Excerpts from Rich's journals reveal her evolution from housewife and mother to new identities as well as her encounters with other poets. Clashes with her parents' personalities and social expectations, and confrontations with her own acculturated racism and blooming awareness of Jewish traumas find elegant passages that offer insight into Rich's own historical place and time. Gilbert's engaging introduction sets the tone for readers to explore the selections chosen for this volume. VERDICT For both popular and academic literature collections and readers across generations.—Francisca Goldsmith, Lib. Ronin, Worcester, MA

Library Journal

★ 2018-05-10
An anthology of the acclaimed poet and essayist's most searing prose.This compendium demonstrates how Rich (Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010, 2010, etc.), who won numerous prestigious awards during her life (1929-2012), also distinguished herself as a formidable public intellectual, literary critic, and cultural theorist. Arguing that the masculine world order has discounted the perspectives of women, Rich devoted her life to fostering "a collective description of the world which will be truly ours." Her essays leveraged her poems and journal entries as illustrations because she sought to dissolve the barriers between the personal, the political, and the aesthetic. In the section taken from her landmark book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976), the author contrasts the supposed bliss of maternity with the "anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom, and division within myself" that she felt as a mother of three young children. This collection features representative samples of Rich's signature critical move, the "re-vision" of literary foremothers whose works had long been misappropriated and misunderstood. She claims, for instance, that Emily Dickinson's reclusive lifestyle was not a sentimental tragedy but rather a practical and liberating choice for an ambitious writer conscious of her unorthodox brilliance and that the carefully controlled style in A Room of One's Own enabled Virginia Woolf to write for women while being overheard by men. Rich's outspoken alliance with lesbian feminists has tended to discourage those readers who could most benefit from her work, yet her thoughts about gender and identity from the 1970s and '80s sound all too current: "A change in the concept of sexual identity is essential if we are not going to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution." Feminist poet and literary critic Gilbert skillfully selects examples that convey the considerable breadth of Rich's purview as an essayist and exhibit her characteristic strategy of rejecting surface explanations and turning experience around in the light of subjective truth. Approachable, effective excerpts afford breathtaking encounters with genius.

Kirkus Reviews

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