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Morton Marcus: -Mort Marcus and I am sitting in the kitchen on a very sunny day on April 3rd, 1996, with one of America's premier poets, that is Adrienne Rich, and I am looking now at some wonderful organic strawberries she has just

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offered me and my sidekick, the wonderful poet Patrice Vecchione. So this will be an interview, and Adrienne will read some poetry from her new book, which has been winning awards all over and has just won the Barber(?) Award -- she is

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shaking no, it has not been winning awards all over -- and that is, "The Dark Fields of the Republic." We will be talking about the implications of the title and the marvelous poems in the book. Adrienne, welcome once again and thank you so much for

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giving us the time to talk to you. Adrienne Rich: It's always a pleasure to talk to Patrice and Mort. You are two of my favorite people in Santa Cruz and it's often very encouraging to me in discouraging times to know that

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you're out there doing what you do. Morton Marcus: Now, you said something which is very interesting to me. You just said "in discouraging times" and I'm going to pick up on that and maybe just talk politics for a

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little while because, "The Dark Fields of the Republic," recall a dreamer of the American dream, which is The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby. And I thought it was amazingly apt that you use your title of your book, and an epigraph from, "The Dark Fields

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of the Republic," because Jay Gatsby would pay with his life for having a romanticized vision of the American Dream. Could you tell us how, "The Dark Fields of the Republic," relate to the sense of the epigraph?

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Adrienne Rich: Well, it is a metaphor, obviously, in Fitzgerald's wonderful last paragraph of "The Great Gatsby." Can I read it because- Morton Marcus: Absolutely.

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Adrienne Rich: It's brief and I think it says it all: "He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere

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back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the Republic rolled on under the night." And of course, there I think Fitzgerald is alluding to the- the- the dark fields of the Republic of the Middle West of

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the unknown America from which Gatsby came and which he so strenuously tried to leave behind him. But I take that also as an allusion to all of the untold history of this land, all of the parts of its history that the history books didn't tell us

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about -- or starting to tell us about now, some -- but the limitless greed, and the ruthlessness on which this Republic was built. And that dream of Gatsby's becomes conflated with the dream of wealth. And it's not just that

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you can change your life, that you can become anything, that the opportunity is limitless, but that wealth defines what you want to become and be. Morton Marcus: This is very apropos because it just seems to

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me that one of the problems that's now happening in America is that- what has become clear is that there is a real sickness at the heart of the capitalist system. And that sickness is it has not released men of goodwill who will take care of each

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other, but it has released a rapacious viciousness for any kind of profit, material profit. Boy, wouldn't it be wonderful if it was spiritual profit? And I take it that's what you're talking about?

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Adrienne Rich: I am, and it seems to me borne out more and more and more by what we're seeing, that when you have a system built on profit, on the bottom line as profit, you can have benign versions of that system., but finally, the system

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itself takes over and becomes totally ruthless. And I think that's what we're seeing now both in the United States -- where it was always seen as somehow more benign, advertised as more benign, you know, everyone has a chance here --

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and also globally, and it's happening very fast, very frightening. And, you know, I find myself- I said a few years ago to a friend of mine, a historian, that I was becoming more Marxist than ever, and she said, "Marxist?" But I reread

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Marx now and I find passages that tell me what is happening, as the system of economic relations finally will affect all human relationships, private affections, that it will contaminate, it will permeate all of our relationships.

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Morton Marcus: Yeah, it's not Marxist as Leninist Marxist, it's Marxist as- Adrienne Rich: [Inaudible] Morton Marcus: Exactly, the visionary who really realized

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this. And the way it is rearing its- maybe one of its most frightening heads right now is with racial hatred and prejudice, where a lot of these right-winged militia white groups refuse to see- or are being turned away by the

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corporations for seeing that the problem is that they are not getting the jobs, they're not being taken care of by workers, and they are of course doing the easy thing and blaming people of different color, people of different ethnic extractions.

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Adrienne Rich: Women also. Morton Marcus: Yeah, I can't forget that but you will remind me of that. Adrienne Rich: Well, I think Patrice and I will do our part.

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Morton Marcus: Well, I don't want to hog this, let me give you to Patrice and go in a different, maybe different direction, or any direction Patrice wants to take it. Patrice Vecchione: Well, let's stay in the same direction and

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let me pose the question to you: in an environment such as this, what then is the role of poetry? What is the particular necessity for poetry in this political- and which, as you said, affects us emotionally, spiritually in every way? How does poetry serve

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us at this time? Adrienne Rich: Well, what I hope- and, you know, I have asked myself that question over and over. And I've also sought answers in many places, in many poetries, certainly. And I think

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it's always a question to continue trying to answer because if we think of poetry as somehow separate from all this, as a special enclave we can retreat into as a place for escape, to put it more bluntly, then I don't think it does

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remain necessary. I think that retreat into enclaves is not what we need. Although certainly we all need rest and pleasure, and the experiences that allow us to stay in touch with our own humaneness, with who we are. But I see poetry as having this

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power to remind us of what a human voice sounds like in the wake of the voices of the media, the voices of politicians, that we can hear in so many different kinds of poetry too, so many different kinds of human voices so that we're reminded

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constantly that the voices that we know best are not the only voices, that this country and this world is filled with human variety and diversity speaking in many tongues, and speaking in many patois, and speaking in many kinds of common speech. So,

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there's that and then there's of course the music and the many kinds of music that poetry brings us. And I feel as if I'm always asking myself, how is it that we've gone in a very few years from a place which I was trying to describe at the

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beginning of my book, "What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics," of a kind of- I said poetry is under house arrest in this country; in a sense it's been disappeared. We've moved very rapidly from that point to a point where

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poetry seems to be something that people are avid for. They're avid to write it, they avid to hear it, they're also avid to read it. Patrice Vecchione: Well, in one of the essays in "What is Found

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There," you talk about technology and poetry. And I see poetry almost disenfranchised from itself when I see it on television, and with a lot of hoopla and gloss. And I wonder, do you experience it that way on the broad screen or not?

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Adrienne Rich: I think that that's not how I experience poetry most of the time so, I mean, I don't look for poetry particularly on television, I go to poetry readings, and I read a great deal of poetry myself. And I think it's alright for it to

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be out there in that form. I think it's fine for it to be out there in that form. I mean, my supposition is that people see it, and then gravitate to real live poetry readings that are going on in their communities, or they go out and buy an

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anthology, a book of poems, they are aware in a new way that this thing called poetry exists. And maybe they're made aware of the fact that it's as exciting and perhaps more exciting than many other things that exist. So that doesn't bother me at this point.

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Morton Marcus: I just had a letter appear in a magazine in which a young poet was interviewed, and the poet said that she did not want to be known as a poet because poets were stuffy, poets were talking about esoteric manners, didn't

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interest her, she was very young. And she was a performance artist, and I think this may be what Patrice is talking about. I think it's great that people get interested in language from performance art, but there is a lack of working on the art of

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poetry, which -- not to seem like an old conservative academic -- really is a respect for words and the power of words and how you can use them so they will really reach deeply or spear deeply into the human psyche and the human heart. That

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is what I consider you were meaning by this glitz and gloss, you see. Adrienne Rich: It's not the technology; it's not the technology that's really bothering you, it's something

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else. Patrice Vecchione: Yeah, it's a lack of regard for the word, that the word needs to be made into something more easily accessible then itself, which to me is also connected to just a

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more of the numbing of America that I see happening. You know, let's numb the community so that they don't feel what they feel. And let's- let's not accept the word as the word because it isn't enough. And in fact, what I think is really being said is,

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let's not accept the word because it is too much. Morton Marcus: For example, a series on TV that you were supposed to be on and then turned out not to be on, "The United States of Poetry." It was marvelous to see all those

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unrecognized poets there, but you did not see the poetry, did not hear the poetry. What you saw were these MTV visuals, so to say. Adrienne Rich: Well, I mean, that's exactly it. I mean, the

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problem of combining visuals with a poem or even with a poet performing her/his poem, and then you have film clips of, I don't know, scenery or a train or something. I mean, how does that really work? I thought it worked very badly. But then I

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think, you know, when we talk about performance artists, or performance poetry, I think of someone like Wanda Coleman, whose use of language is incredible and who also performs her poems. I just saw her and heard her and saw her in San

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Diego and that was born in upon me yet again because I read her poems on the page and have tremendous admiration for them. And she was clearly getting these poems across to a very young audience, they were mostly students at this festival, and

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it was all working together, but that doesn't always happen. Morton Marcus: And I think Wanda is a good example of what we should use as an example for this, because she is such a marvelous poet. And if she could never even say her poems, you

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know, on the page they have the power and the rhythm and the drive. And what performance poetry- and when this first started in Australia, I was there. They- my argument was, the word you're not paying attention to the word because

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you're paying attention to what the word is going to do as far as arouse an audience that is hearing it for one time. And Wanda's not thinking in those terms, she's thinking performance but also page. And as maybe we can expand this now,

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as everyone tells us, we're coming to the end of the age of the book as we have computers, how does this all figure in also, and just another little thing to throw in and have to talk about, Adrienne?

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Adrienne Rich: Well, I've decided that I don't want to be a prophet of the future, I'm not a futurist. [Laughs] I have a lot of faith in the book, and that may be my personal proclivity but I'm not as bothered by that kind of

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prediction as I might be. I mean, we have seen societies in which books were censored or never even able to be published, where they passed around as in Samizdat in the Soviet Union. I think that people want- they want the book, they want the

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thing that they can hold and carry around with them and pull out at a certain point or hand to somebody else and I don't think that that's replaceable, but as I say, I'm no futurist. Patrice Vecchione: In your newest book, in the poem,

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"Comrade," you write: "When a voice learns to sing, it can be heard as dangerous. When a voice learns to listen, it can be heard as desperate." I mean, those lines resonate incredibly for me. How is it that we learn to sing and when is it do you

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think that we must listen? Adrienne Rich: Well, I was thinking about- I was thinking of course about poetry but probably any art, that when you come into your powers, when you really become capable in an art,

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you are dangerous, you are dangerous or you can be perceived as dangerous because you're effective. But when the practicing artist also learns to listen to other artists, and to take in the scope of the world landscape that they are bringing

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in, there can be a sense of desperation, of 'This is not just the crisis of my time and place, this is a much larger crisis. There are worse crises going on than I knew." And I'm not saying that all art is always about crisis, but that's

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what those two lines we're trying to probe, that you begin to receive the messages sent out by others who are suffering, who are resisting, and taking those in can feel desperate. I think it's also- that it's also tremendously empowering and

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strengthening, but that's what I was trying to talk about there. Morton Marcus: Well, I would like you to read some poems from the dark Republic, or, "The Dark Fields of the Republic," and let people see this. While you're looking for what you're going to

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read, this is the book that follows, "An Atlas of the Difficult World," and it seems as though this has become those two lines that Patrice quoted. You become much, not only darker, but almost more desperate in these poems because

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the vision is- is darkening. So that may, you know, give you a clue to what you may want to read now, and again, maybe not. But I'm not going to direct you, Adrienne. But it's very interesting, and as she does read, let me tell you, it is

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such a beautiful book. Norton does you so proud. I got the galleys, the bound galleys. And then when the regular book came out, and you sent me a copy, it's just so beautiful the way they finally did it with this dark dark blue, which is

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peaceful, and then the beautiful painting in the center of it. Anyway, you now have the poem. For people out there, we're talking with Adrienne Rich, and we are talking about, "The Dark Fields of the Republic, Poems 1991-1995," which was released

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last fall, and which Patrice and I have been trying to coordinate our times to finally talk to Adrienne about, and so here is Adrienne going to read from it, and probably have some words for the poems she's going to read.

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Adrienne Rich: Well, I'd just like to say before I begin that there is a lot of, not desperateness, I think, in this book, but trying to face very tough realities. At the same time that I don't experience the world simply as a desperate and

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terrible place, I experience the world as filled with joy and also filled with love. And I'm angry at the efforts to tell us that we don't deserve that joy and that love and even that it's without value, you know, that it's not going to make you any

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money, so I hope that these poems reflect that. I'm going to read this little series of short poems called, "What Kind of Times Are These?" and the title of this comes from Bert Brecht. His poem were for those in a future time, where he says,

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"What kind of times are these when it seems almost a crime to talk about trees, because it means means keeping silent about so many evil deeds." WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE

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There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill, and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows, near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows.

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I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled, this isn't a Russian poem. This is not somewhere else but here. Our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear.

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I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light. Ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmould paradise: I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

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And I won't tell you where it is so why do I tell you anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these, to have you listen at all, it's necessary to talk about trees. IN THOSE YEARS

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In those years, people will say we lost track of the meaning of we, of you. We found ourselves reduced to I, and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: We were trying to live a personal life, and yes, that was the only life we could bear

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witness to. But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather. They were headed somewhere else, but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the

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rags of fog, where we stood, saying I. TO THE DAYS, and the Rosa in this poem is Rosa Luxemburg. And the you in the poem is the days themselves, the days of our lives as we're living them.

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Morton Marcus: Could you tell the people out there, believe it or not, could you tell them who Rosa Luxemburg was? Adrienne Rich: Okay. She was a great revolutionary, 19th century German communist revolutionary. She was a

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brilliant woman and a passionate woman. And she believed that she was destined to extend Marx's theory and wrote a remarkable book called, "The Accumulation of Capital." She was also a full-time activist and revolutionary and she was

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murdered, and her body was flung into the Landwehr Canal in Berlin. And the days are- and but she was she's a model of someone who lived her life to the edge with joy. Morton Marcus: Just before you read it, the Rosa Luxemburg

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story, done by the New German Cinema, has been on Bravo and all you people who will be listening out there next three weeks it's been on and will be on and off for the next thirty days. Very, very powerful film.

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Adrienne Rich: I'm very glad to know that, I'll watch. And the days in this poem, the you in this poem is the days of our lives. TO THE DAYS

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From you, I want more than I've ever asked, all of it. The newscasters' terrible stories of life in my time, the knowing it's worse than that, much worse than knowing what it means to be lied to.

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Fog in the mornings, hunger for clarity, coffee and bread with sour plum jam, numbness of soul in placid neighborhoods, lives ticking on as if. A typewriter's torrent suddenly still,. Blue soaking through

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fog, two dragonflies wheeling. Acceptable levels of cruelty, steadily rising. Whatever you bring in your hands, I need to see it. Suddenly I understand the verb without tenses, to smell another

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woman's hair, to taste her skin, to know the bodies drifting underwater. "To be human," said Rosa, "I can't teach you that." A cat drinks from a bowl of marigolds, his moment. Surely the love of life is never ending, the failure of nerve, a

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charred fuse? I want more from you than I ever knew to ask. Wild pink lilies erupting, tasseled stalks of corn in the Mexican gardens, corn and roses. Shortening days, strawberry fields in ferment with tossed aside, bruised fruit.

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Morton Marcus: Okay, thank you. Again very, very powerful poems. And as we go on, it is interesting how women like little diamonds come out of these poems. And I was very interested in a poem you have later on, in which Ethel

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Rosenberg appears. It looks like it's a photograph you're seeing of her, or remembered newsreel picture. And it recalls not only history and not only these incidents, and what have happened to people who have been important on our changes, but it

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recalls them as women, and recalls them as human beings, especially Ethel, as wife, mother, things like that. It totally captures her in all roles of womanhood and as victim. And again, a person who had become in this way

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dangerous, I think she becomes beyond herself and even the case that involved her. So your concern with feminism I would love to get into and talk to, and I know that you, Patrice, have a question about that.

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Patrice Vecchione: Well, I'm interested- well, things are crashing but nothing to- Morton Marcus: We're in a human kitchen. Patrice Vecchione: We're in a human kitchen. I'm glad we're

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not in a non-human kitchen. I'm interested in the relationship between your feminism and your poetry. I mean, in a sense, everything you've been speaking of has spoken to that in the broad definition, that I have anyway, of feminism. But can you

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speak more particularly about the relationship between those two aspects of your life, feminism and poetry, and how they inform one another? Adrienne Rich: Well, I think that- I've often said I was

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looking for a feminist movement long before it actually came along in my lifetime. And I think that some of that search is there in my very early work in a very buried and unconscious way, but- And then for a long time, in the incredible cresting

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of creativity that accompanied the early years of the women's movement in the late 60s and early 70s and I would say to the end of the 70s, enormous creativity, discovery, institution building in the sense of presses, small presses,

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publications, suddenly, a whole arena in which women's work was be [cut-off]. Morton Marcus: We're talking about feminism, and how it returns in her work and how important it is integrated into

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the work. Adrienne Rich: I was trying to describe the landscape of the 70s, when so many feminist institutions were being created. And I was talking about institutions like journals, like

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small presses, women's bookstores, and all the ways in which women's writing was being encouraged, searched for, fostered, made visible, reprints of long out of print works by women, translations of women's poetry from around the world

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suddenly made available that we hadn't had before. It was a very thrilling time, culturally, as well as in so many other ways. And that sense of art, both expanding its reach through a movement, and drawing on that movement for insight and energy

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was- is something that when you have that sense, you know, it's possible. And you know that there is something between a community and its art that is very precious and very miraculous, and that strengthens both the community and the

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artist. Morton Marcus: If I've ever seen it before, that certainly was a time, and if I can make one of my bold and very pompous statements, when we look at this in retrospect, in the history of

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American letters, this will be a total demarcation point, because this was such a literary inspired time for women, that, in fact, even the production and the publication will show that this really was the time for women's emergence and flowering

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in the art of literature. And it was so important for people, finally to be able to speak, supposedly the male side of the brain, to put things into words and say, look at us, this is how we feel, this is how we think. We are real, and we are alive,

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and have been for quite some time. Adrienne Rich: Yeah, and so- I mean, I think that with that experience, I have sought that experience ever since. As a woman, and as a feminist, as a human being, as a member of many

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communities, whether poetic, whether political, that exchange of energy between the poet, or the artist, and the audience. And it's very interesting, I was reading a volume of essays by the Canadian writer, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, she's West

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Indian and she talks about the importance of keeping in mind the difference between community, audience, and market. And I feel never more than today do we need to keep those distinctions clear. And she says, your community is your

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community and you draw on it, and you want to reach it through your art. But there will be people in your community who are not your audience. And you may have an audience which is in part not of your community, by which she would mean I would

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think, ethnic, or class, but also probably community in the sense of a women's community or a gay and lesbian community. But that there's this overlap between audience and community. But then she says market is something wholly different. And

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that is when your work is perceived by someone outside as a commodity that can be marketed and is being purveyed with an eye to that outside of its context and perhaps against the grain of what you're trying to do, an aberration of what you're

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trying to do. Morton Marcus: In an interview that I did with you a number of years ago, not a number, a very short time ago for both of us, you talked about poor Frida Kahlo, those are almost your

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exact words, she has become a commodity. Adrienne Rich: Yes, and- Well, I would say, in one sense, no one can pervert or commoditize her art. Becoming the icon that is found on every wastebasket as it were is not, I think, a

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desirable thing for an artist, and of course it was of- at no use whatsoever to her. I think that for us who are living and who have any possibility of becoming commoditized in that way, it's very urgent to keep reminding ourselves, you know,

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what country and what economic system we're living and working in. And you asked me about that, or I guess I told you that there had been a very hostile review of this book in The New York Times Book Review. And I wasn't pleased at first, but finally,

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it did confirm for me that I haven't made myself so acceptable after all. And that there is a- there is a great deal of resistance to my work, which I take to be a compliment. Morton Marcus: I know that Patrice wants to get back at the

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microphone, but let me just say this when you were reading the first poem, and even when I read it myself especially the first- the opening poem of the book, I was struck by the fact that it is very much like one of my favorite poems by Robert Frost,

00:39:54.140 - 00:40:09.280

who of course has become one of these commoditized images. And that is the poem that begins -- and I always forget it -- "Back now out of all of this," in which it's- Adrienne Rich: "-now too much for us." It's "Directive," it's

00:40:09.280 - 00:40:16.900

his greatest poem. Morton Marcus: That's it: "Directive." Adrienne Rich: It's absolutely his greatest poem. Morton Marcus: And it speaks to everything presciently that you

00:40:16.900 - 00:40:28.840

are engaging right now; not everything, but most of the things that we're living through right now. Of course we don't remember him for these poems, you see, but they're there, they're there. And I must add this to something we said in the

00:40:28.840 - 00:40:44.770

first hour, they are dangerous poems. And what you have given is not only inspiration, but you have been dangerous to the powers that be in the way you have led and been one of the leaders of this feminist movement, and shown other women:

00:40:44.770 - 00:40:59.380

Look, this is how you can grow. This is the direction, this is what you can speak about. So in this way, you are dangerous, but so necessary also. And of course, not just to women, what you do is you lead us all and inspire us all. And I know that

00:40:59.890 - 00:41:10.960

will make you humble, you know, and embarrassed but you shouldn't be because we are sitting here today greatly honored to be in your presence. Well, Patrice and I, and she is nodding on the side here, so.

00:41:16.450 - 00:41:31.510

Patrice Vecchione: Adrienne hands the microphone to me. Well, then I want to ask you, in relation to the poet you were quoting, who is your community? Who is it that you write your poems for?

00:41:38.410 - 00:42:08.290

Adrienne Rich: I think that I have a sense of there being all kinds of people out there, strangers who I will never know, who read poetry, who may read my poetry, and who deserve the very best that I can make. And it's a kind of challenge to keep

00:42:08.290 - 00:42:38.740

creating in a way that offers the best I have to offer. And that isn't either staying in one place and repeating yourself, or trying to be constantly new and original just for the sake of being new and original, but to try to tell the truth, to try to

00:42:38.740 - 00:43:05.110

go to the heart of things. And I think that there are a great many people out there wanting that from art, from all art and specifically from the art of poetry. And to be able to- what interests me right now, what I am thinking a lot about is how

00:43:05.110 - 00:43:38.890

can you communicate what needs to be communicated and still keep the music, still keep the complexity, still sort of right on that edge of the dream where the dream is almost not paraphraseable, isn't paraphraseable, where you can't

00:43:38.890 - 00:44:01.300

really say this poem equals this statement. I want my poems not equal a statement. I want them to be textured, I want them to be multi-layered, I want them to be resonant. And all of that in the interest of making them effective.

00:44:03.820 - 00:44:15.220

Patrice Vecchione: Was it Donald Hall who said poetry is the unsayable said, in which case it can't be a reiteration of a direct statement, because it's so much more than that. Do you think?

00:44:17.160 - 00:44:43.470

Adrienne Rich: Well, yeah, I mean, I think a lot of poets attempt to say what can't be said about poetry too, you know. And, you know, my son, one of my sons, who has been a musician, said to me at one point that writing about music is kind of a

00:44:43.470 - 00:45:11.520

contradiction in terms and maybe writing about poetry in a certain way is, it's there. I think that certain critics have made us able to read certain poems more deeply and truthfully. But for the most part, it is an art that pulls on

00:45:11.520 - 00:45:33.430

more than what can be defined. Patrice Vecchione: Emily Dickinson, I'm going to paraphrase her, said, I know it is poetry when I feel as though the top of my head were coming off. What is it in a poem that

00:45:33.490 - 00:45:50.020

gives you a similar experience to the top of your head coming off? When I hear a poem that startles me, I get goosebumps. It is not an intellectual experience, it is a whole integrated experience. So what is it in a poem that gives you

00:45:50.050 - 00:46:07.090

an experience akin to that? Adrienne Rich: Well, I've just been writing a foreword to a book of poems by a wonderful poet named Thomas Avena, Mercury House is bringing it out this year, it's called, "Dream

00:46:07.120 - 00:46:37.900

of Order." And one of the things that I talk about in his poetry, which I feel is true of the poetry that makes me physically, physically tremble -- or, as you said, get goosebumps -- is what I call the unexpected inevitable, that you realize

00:46:37.900 - 00:46:56.920

when you've read these words, that they had to exist but you had never, never dreamed that they could exist. And whether that's for actually what, you know, what they seem to be saying, or whether it's simply the sound. I don't know, I mean,

00:46:57.520 - 00:47:22.480

it might be both, it might be either, but that's certainly one thing that inspires that kind of physical reaction in me. And it is very physical and, you know, I love the poem on the page. And you can get such- you can have such a physical reaction reading

00:47:22.480 - 00:47:25.420

poems on the page silently [cut-off].