Political= Personal

Adrienne Rich believed that politics is intertwined and innate in every human. Politics are derived from what and when humans are emotional about. In 1969 Rich explored this aspect with her readers in the poem “The Blue Ghazals” when she writes, “The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political.” Emotions and passions elicit political activism. Rich embodied this message by voicing her concerns through her poetry. One example is in her poem “Implosions,” placed around the time of the Vietnam War, suggests her discomfort about continuing the Vietnam War. The speaker of the poem has ways in which to stop the war. Rich writes, “My hands are knotted in the rope / and I cannot sound the bell” and “The foot is in the wheel” (13-14, 17). In each phrase the speaker has a way to stop the death, but refuses. It is only after it is all said and done that the speaker asks, “I’ll have done nothing / even for you” (22-23). When writing this poem, Rich was advocating that the people that could stop the war, chose to hold it out despite the continuing death toll. Rich wants the people holding back to do something, to have humanity for those that are dying. This poem is a great example of how emotion has driven Rich herself to write about political moves she does not agree with. She has taken her own wisdom to heart to expose her emotions, and essentially political position, about the seemingly never-ending Vietnam War.

The inseparable nature of feeling and politics was not only held by Rich, but one of her contemporaries, Audre Lorde. Lorde wrote in her essay, Poems are Not Luxury’s, about the interconnection between everyday life and emotion to a female responsibility to take action based on those initial feelings. She advocates for active participation of females in order to make this world a better place for generations to come. Lorde writes, “For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 A.M., after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths” (285). Essentially Lorde argues that there are no new concepts, only the way in which individuals perceive, experience, and act on the personal and intimate emotions. It is an individual’s responsibility to act on these feelings, which is in accordance with Rich’s view.

Lorde, Audre. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture, no. 3, 1977.

Rich, Adrienne Cecile. “The Blue Ghazals” The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970. W.W. Norton and Company, 1971.

Diving into the Wreck

Adrienne Rich Reading "Diving into the Wreck"

In Rich’s book Diving into the Wreck there was also a poem titled “Diving into the Wreck.”  The poem illustrates a quest to rewrite the cultural understanding of gender.  The poem seems to be describing a diver examining what they have only known as a myth.  Yet, half of the poem is devoted to the steps the diver takes in order to get close to the wreck, rather than actually seeing the wreck.  Alice Templeton wrote, “the poem’s attention to the process of exploring the wreck and not the analysis of the wreck.”  This analysis is about the routine of the diver in order to reach the objective.  Further in the poem Rich writes, “I am she: I am he” (77). This makes the speaker androgynous and puts both sexes at the same level, as if differences were non-existent.  More broadly, Margret Atwood writes, “This quest- the quest for something beyond myths, for the truths about men and women, about the ‘I’ and the ‘You,’ the He and the She or more generally . . . about the powerless and the powerful.”  She suggests that the objective of the poem, and other’s in the collection, are about finding the actualities of gender differences rather than what has been discerned in the past.  Instead of letting society and culture decide the differences, or lack of differences, the diver takes it upon themselves to find the certainties and to describe the process in how they will go about this. This personal responsibility for cultural issues is shown when the speaker states, “the thing I came for: / the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth” (62-64).  Rich has taken the idea of a quest and applied it to the connotations surrounding gender.  Rich wanted to take the idea of gender and equalize the differences.

Rich, Adrienne Cecile. “Diving into the Wreck,” Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972. Norton &  Company, 1973.

From Modern American Poetry Website, Templeton, Alice. The Dream and the Dialogue:             Adrienne Rich’s Feminist Poetics. Copyright @ 1994 by the University of Tennessee Press.

From Modern American Poetry Website, Atwood, Margaret. The New York Times Book Review (1973).

Modern American Poetry Critique