00:00:02.940 - 00:00:22.120

Adrienne Rich: THE FACT OF A DOORFRAME Means there is something to hold on to with both hands while slowly thrusting my forehead against the wood and taking it away one of the oldest motions of suffering as Makeba sings a

00:00:22.630 - 00:00:45.940

courage-song for warriors. Music is suffering made powerful. I think of the story of the goose-girl who passed through the high gate where the head of her favorite mare was nailed to the arch and in a human voice, "If she could see thee now, thy

00:00:45.940 - 00:01:15.580

mother's heart would break," said the head of Falada. Now, again, poetry, violent, arcane, common, hewn of the commonest living substance into archway, portal, frame I grasp for you, your blood stained splinters, your ancient and stubborn poise

00:01:15.580 - 00:01:48.010

-- as the earth trembles -- burning out from the grain. Morton Marcus: That was Adrienne Rich, reading her poem on, "The Fact of a Doorframe." Adrienne Rich is our guest tonight on the Sunday night special. We will be speaking to her for the next two

00:01:48.010 - 00:02:53.010

hours about her poetry and her ideas on this very, very special program on KUSP. Good evening, this is Mort Marcus and Joan Zimmerman is very expertly handling the board tonight. So we've got two poets

00:02:53.010 - 00:03:09.990

who now are staring at Adrienne Rich and are looking forward to this evening, and Adrienne, welcome to KUSP, you've been here before, and in fact, you've been gracing our county for the last seven years. And of course, I remember you from years ago as

00:03:09.990 - 00:03:26.000

an East Coast poet, if that is not a dirty word. What are you actually doing out here in California, which has suddenly bloomed into so much of the environment of your poetry? Adrienne Rich: Well, Mort, I came out here seven years ago

00:03:26.090 - 00:03:44.870

for my health. I loved the landscape. I had visited California very often, but I'd never really thought of myself as living here. And it wasn't until I spent part of a couple of winters teaching actually in Southern California, but with

00:03:44.870 - 00:04:07.010

the opportunity to spend some weeks in Santa Cruz, that I began to think that it was a possible way out of the kinds of physical and emotional constraints of the Northeast as far as the climate was concerned for me, the winters especially.

00:04:08.720 - 00:04:30.830

And I was very fortunate in being able to make that move when I did, because I might not economically, and in other terms, have been able to do it much later. It has turned out for me to be, not only physically but in terms of my

00:04:30.830 - 00:04:58.280

poetry and my whole life, a very marvelous thing. I was fifty-five when I moved out here purposefully for good and that's an age which it's a very good thing to make changes of this kind, I think, because I've not only felt rejuvenated in many

00:04:58.280 - 00:05:24.620

ways by the place but I felt stretched, expanded, as a human being and as a poet by living on this side of the continent, and by beginning to partake of life here, a life which in many ways is, in spite of all of the conformity and uniformity that

00:05:24.620 - 00:05:38.830

we lament in United States culture, very different from life on the coast where I grew up and lived for so many years. Morton Marcus: I certainly recognize what you're talking about because that's the same reason I've been here all these

00:05:38.830 - 00:05:45.550

years. Adrienne Rich: Well, you've been here much longer, Mort. How many years have you been here? Morton Marcus: I've actually been out on the West Coast now

00:05:45.550 - 00:06:01.390

since 1961, going back to live in the East Coast for one year, which I found so psychically, emotionally, and creatively disastrous that I ran back here after putting my ex-wife on a television show to get us enough money to get out of New York to

00:06:01.390 - 00:06:19.810

California. The reason I opened and asked you about that is that your new book, "An Atlas of the Difficult World," especially that long poem which opens the book, really is set right here in California, in the middle of mid-California. And it really,

00:06:19.810 - 00:06:35.530

for readers out there who have loved your work and do not know that this book is out, and I don't know how they couldn't, there's been so much publicity attending it, it really is about the landscape, both interior and exterior, that we inhabit right

00:06:35.530 - 00:06:46.170

out here in California, and America as a nation and in the world as well. Adrienne Rich: Well, it's funny because you asked me to start the program by reading a poem and I read, "The Fact of a

00:06:46.170 - 00:07:01.590

Doorframe," which has been a poem that for many years I've introduced readings with and I realized that I didn't really understand what a door frame meant until I moved to California and started living through earthquakes. I mean,

00:07:01.590 - 00:07:24.390

theoretically, it was there in the poem, but, "The Fact of the Doorframe," became something very, very graphic and concrete to me in 1989, and when "the earth trembles" became a very concrete reality for me too, it was no metaphor anymore.

00:07:25.860 - 00:07:35.250

Morton Marcus: You know, there are so many ways we can- we can go with this show. I've just been thinking while you've been saying that, I just for the first time realized what, "The Fact of a Doorframe," means. It's not really metaphor, you

00:07:35.250 - 00:07:51.750

really in your poetry in the last ten years or more having going beyond metaphor, beyond myth to the thing itself, to the people itself. And yet, metaphor has such a strong center in your work, and that to me, your work is what I call with a lot of

00:07:51.990 - 00:08:11.130

other East European poets, emblematic. The diver who dives, and diving into the wreck is emblematic of so many things, has such a, pardon the pun, richness to him/her that I certainly feel that with your work. But it seems like the

00:08:11.130 - 00:08:24.540

poetry has gone beyond that now and we can talk about that because in talking to you, Adrienne Rich, and for you listeners out there, you're talking to a person who has grown with this century since World War II, and has grown

00:08:24.540 - 00:08:36.990

dramatically in all the ways that this planet has grown. And as we find ourselves in December 1991, do you want to talk anything about that? Adrienne Rich: Well, you know, I was driving today and I was

00:08:36.990 - 00:09:02.730

thinking that I feel very grateful for having been born in 1929. It's a point of location. I was born just- I was born in May, the crash was in October. And I feel as though in- through my parents and grandparents and through the people, the adults

00:09:02.730 - 00:09:25.080

who were around me as I was growing up as a child, I could reach back into that earlier part of the century, which was in some way so much more optimistic, and in other ways, of course not, but which still had certain illusions, shall we

00:09:25.080 - 00:09:43.800

say. And at the same time, I locate myself as coming into the world just before that point when the bottom fell out of everything. And from then on through the 30s, going into World War II, and coming out of World War II, and having as a

00:09:43.800 - 00:10:02.670

sixteen year old in 1945 to deal with the evidence of the Holocaust, to deal with Hiroshima, with the knowledge of the nuclear bomb, and I'm not saying that as a sixteen year old in the world which I grew up, all of these things were

00:10:02.670 - 00:10:23.070

understood or fathomed or assimilated, but just there they were, staring us in the face in 1945. And so, I feel that history has been interlaced with my living, it's interlaced with everyone's living, but it's sort of like they're these crucial

00:10:23.070 - 00:10:53.070

dates 1929, 1945 that embrace my young growing up. and that were dates that in a sense symbolize the loss of certain kinds of illusions about history. Although, of course, I think as this country went on into the 50s, there was a kind of

00:10:54.210 - 00:11:16.950

delusion of optimism that we were going to be the biggest and the greatest and the best and we had won the war and so forth. But it's important to me to lodge myself in those dates and that probably has something to do with why I started at a young

00:11:16.950 - 00:11:27.120

age dating my poems in my published books, I think it was in my third book. Morton Marcus: I think 1954- Adrienne Rich: Because I began to see that my poems too are

00:11:27.120 - 00:11:41.370

part of a historical process, they were part of a personal historical process, not necessarily as I saw it in a larger historical process. Morton Marcus: I'm just taking off on one of those side roads

00:11:41.370 - 00:11:53.340

and we can take off on any one of them. If you don't want to take off on this one, we can turn around and do another one. Poetry was very different then. I've written somewhere that the poetry that was being written after the 40s and through the

00:11:53.340 - 00:12:10.950

first part of the 50s really was an attempt by people who had been disoriented by both the war and the depression to find some security in forms. And your first poems that won you so many awards and are so beautiful to read even today were very, very

00:12:10.950 - 00:12:26.760

formal poems. And, or I could say, not the poems of a different person, but the poems of a different person. Adrienne Rich: Well, I think you're right. Actually, I'd like to read the first poem from my first book because it certainly

00:12:26.760 - 00:12:53.040

has struck me in later years that this poem, which I wrote probably in 1949, when I was nineteen or twenty years old, it's called, "Swarm Warnings," which is a poem that seems to be about self protectiveness in defense more than anything else,

00:12:53.670 - 00:13:09.990

and certainly had to do with the armored young person I was. It was also the poem of a young person who was living with the knowledge of the Holocaust, of the Nuclear Age, of the Cold War, and so I'd like to read that.

00:13:11.010 - 00:13:28.740

STORM WARNINGS The glass has been falling all the afternoon, and knowing better than the instrument what winds are walking overhead, what zone of gray unrest is moving across the land, I leave the

00:13:28.740 - 00:13:48.810

book upon a pillowed chair and walk from window to closed window, watching boughs strain against the sky. And think again, as often when the air moves inward toward a silent core of waiting, how would the single purpose time

00:13:48.810 - 00:14:13.030

has traveled by secret currents of the undiscerned into this polar realm. Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on regardless of prediction. Between foreseeing and averting change lies all the mastery of

00:14:13.060 - 00:14:32.530

elements which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter. Time in the hand is not control of time, not shattered fragments of an instrument a proof against the wind, the wind will rise, we can only close the shutters.

00:14:34.300 - 00:14:55.480

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black and set a match to candles sheathed in glass against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine of weather through the unsealed aperture. This is our sole defense against the season; these are the things

00:14:55.480 - 00:15:16.590

that we have learned to do who live in troubled region. Morton Marcus: There's so much in there I mean, lines spring out in hindsight, thirty years later, things that we have learned to do, the way the character's speaking in here,

00:15:17.580 - 00:15:31.920

whether it be poet or character, I always refer to it that way, is in a house, is not in the elements but is protected by the walls of that house which so many times that I'd read you reminds me of the poem by William Carlos Williams looking

00:15:31.920 - 00:15:45.780

at the young housewife early in the morning, who was protected by the walls of her husband's house, that whole image which comes. And yet the sense of menace of something not quite right, which just goes through all of these poems, whether it's

00:15:45.780 - 00:15:53.180

Aunt Julia- Adrienne Rich: Aunt Jennifer. Morton Marcus: Aunt Jennifer with her tigers, who was also locked in her husband's house who seems to be wearing the

00:15:53.180 - 00:16:10.460

ring, almost like a handcuff, or finger cuffs though so to speak. "Living in Sin," which I remember reading over and over again, are not quite the way we want romantic love to be. It's shabby, it's not living up to its chivalric romance illusion.

00:16:11.270 - 00:16:22.160

This is what fill these early poems and I find, therefore, in hindsight that a lot of what happened with, "Snapshots," that later book of yours and poem- Adrienne Rich: "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," yes.

00:16:23.240 - 00:16:37.670

Morton Marcus: -really is present in these poems; there is a discomfiture in here, as if you know that something is not quite right for you, now. Adrienne Rich: Well, and with the world in a sense, and I grew

00:16:37.670 - 00:16:53.150

up, I mean, I was growing up and when this first book was published, I was a senior in college, so I was still growing up. But as a relatively privileged young person, you know, middle class, white, getting a very good education,

00:16:54.380 - 00:17:15.590

believing that I was the citizen of, as I say, the country that won the war, everything was going to be fine for my generation. Almost a sense of being elect, you know, or chosen, that things had gone well for me. Of course, there's

00:17:16.010 - 00:17:32.540

enormous denial in that, but it's also a young person's hopefulness and optimism and desire to be optimistic, and yet that undercutting sense that there are unsealed apertures that you cannot be so protected.

00:17:33.560 - 00:17:45.470

Morton Marcus: And that certainly does come through here. Also this book, which would even make you live more in the world of delusion, but would not, this book won you the Yale Younger Poets Award, and instant fame.

00:17:45.930 - 00:17:59.380

Adrienne Rich: Well, yes, it was a kind of instant delusion too, believe me. Morton Marcus: Okay, we go through this book, I don't know how much you want to read off it or what poems you want to read

00:17:59.410 - 00:18:09.370

off it. We go through, "The Diamond Cutters," which I kept with me throughout my last three years in the Air Force wherever I went. Adrienne Rich: I'm very moved to hear that.

00:18:09.720 - 00:18:27.570

Morton Marcus: Yeah, I mean, these closed poems were just so beautifully done that I would just, you know, reread them again and again and again. And then there's literally a period of almost eight years, when suddenly we have, "Snapshots of

00:18:27.570 - 00:18:42.480

a Daughter-in-Law," and things have begun to change. And interestingly, and I don't know how biographical you want to get into this, a lot of the angers you had against your children and just living the daily life of being a successful, happy

00:18:42.480 - 00:19:01.110

housewife, you began to question much more deeply. Adrienne Rich: Well, I think my angers, I mean, of course, a mother takes her anger out on her children to some extent, it's very painful even to think about. But my anger I think was

00:19:02.370 - 00:19:29.250

deeper and more encompassing because it was also, it was an anger at not being able either to be, or feeling unable, either to be the kind of good mother that was stereotyped in the 50s who was perfectly there, totally and wholly present for children

00:19:29.250 - 00:19:46.940

and for husband, and also not being able to be the kind of poet that I knew I needed to be, that these two destinies seemed in irreconcilable conflict. Morton Marcus: Okay, what type of a poet did you think you were

00:19:46.940 - 00:20:00.830

then? In other words, if it was not the poet you wanted to be, what did you think -- and I know, I've read your essays on this -- but what kind of a poet did you think you were at that point, and how had this society and the male-dominated poetry

00:20:00.830 - 00:20:14.990

world really sort of almost put you into a category or into a cubby hole? Adrienne Rich: Well, I saw myself as having published this book that won the Yale Award, which I knew was very elegant,

00:20:14.990 - 00:20:37.040

which was very technically excellent, technically proficient, which felt to me almost, before it was published, that it didn't go nearly far enough. And the points in, "The Diamond Cutters," which I think of as a not very good second

00:20:37.070 - 00:20:52.480

book, although I'm very glad to know that it meant a lot to you, and that was my feeling about it, which had to do with my own dissatisfactions with what I was able to accomplish. Morton Marcus: It was that take on proficiency, you see, that

00:20:52.480 - 00:21:08.970

phrasing which was what I was looking for as I seriously began to try and carve some technical sense for myself. Adrienne Rich: Sure. And you see, I don't deny that I think that's very important, but it can become a trap if that's

00:21:09.390 - 00:21:36.450

where you stop and -- as you very well know -- and I felt trapped by it and I felt no, very little sense of how living a kind of daily domestic life I could touch the wildness, let's say, that I needed to touch to write a different kind of

00:21:36.450 - 00:21:48.610

poetry. Morton Marcus: So here we had formal diction, we had rhyme, and much, much more formality in, "The Diamond Cutters," than in the first book, it seems to me. Rhymes are even much, much

00:21:48.610 - 00:21:55.180

more- Adrienne Rich: Perhaps, yes. Morton Marcus: Concerned- Adrienne Rich: More groping for control or reaching for control.

00:21:55.210 - 00:22:12.970

Morton Marcus: Maybe that's it, but when I read both of the selections over in "Poems Selected, Old and New," I was struck by that fact. And then in around 1958, you sit down and you write, "Snapshots of a Daughter-in0-Law," and something

00:22:12.970 - 00:22:28.850

happened. Why don't you tell us about this? Adrienne Rich: Well, that poem, I mean, the title poem of that book came out of a lot of little dribs and drabs of pieces of paper that I was scribbling on, whenever I could in the

00:22:28.850 - 00:22:48.410

intricacies of that domestic life. I mean, I was writing as so many women have written, in fragments, but still trying somehow to keep in touch with the art. And I, you know, I acknowledge it's not only women. I know men and women, who have

00:22:48.620 - 00:23:03.230

had to do certain kinds of work day in and day out which was not particularly conducive to the writing of poetry, or at any rate, which arrested one's attention in other directions, have done that.

00:23:03.260 - 00:23:22.420

Morton Marcus: You were a housewife? Adrienne Rich: And I had three children within six years. And- but more than anything, I feel as if there was a crushing ideology of womanhood and of motherhood in the 50s that was

00:23:22.450 - 00:23:37.030

coming down over me and so many other women, I know that, and that was the thing that I needed to fight my way out of, but I didn't even know it was an ideology; I thought it was the way things were.

00:23:41.110 - 00:23:53.510

Morton Marcus: Continue talking- Adrienne Rich: I mean, well, I mean, the poem, 'Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," really began to take form when I realized that all of these scraps of paper with pieces of poems on

00:23:53.510 - 00:24:09.680

them had a central theme, and the theme was the condition of being a woman. And I hadn't planned that, I hadn't thought it up, and then somewhere along the way I read the English translation of Simone de Beauvoir's, "The Second Sex,"

00:24:10.100 - 00:24:33.260

was published in this country. And I read it and I gasped because someone else had been thinking some of the things that I had been thinking, and had also done this incredibly scholarly work around these thoughts, these ideas which felt

00:24:33.260 - 00:24:45.440

so heretical to me. And that gave me a lot of courage and to write the poem. It would have been very hard to do it without her. Morton Marcus: It's fascinating how books that are published by

00:24:45.440 - 00:25:02.910

big publishing houses affect our lives is amazing. At that point, my first wife and I were reading Simone de Beauvoir's, "Second Sex," to each other, probably the same year. Adrienne Rich: Well, I have to tell you that I felt I was

00:25:02.910 - 00:25:17.910

reading it in a lot of isolation because women I knew were reading the book. And we would sort of whisper about it behind our hands and say, isn't that interesting? But the idea that we could get together in a group and discuss it even was somehow

00:25:17.940 - 00:25:28.230

out of the question. Morton Marcus: Interesting, yeah. I remember in those days, they were still having parties in which the women went out to the kitchen and talked about curtains and cooking, and the

00:25:28.230 - 00:25:36.320

men were in the living room. Adrienne Rich: Well, you don't know what the women talked about. Morton Marcus: No, no, but it was- it seems like an awful long

00:25:36.320 - 00:25:49.550

time ago. Would you read for us then and maybe talk about some of the things that happened in, "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," the actual title poem of that book. Adrienne Rich: Well, that's a pretty long one to read, but I

00:25:49.550 - 00:26:28.970

would probably read maybe a section or two from it. Adrienne Rich: A thinking woman sleeps with monsters. The beak Morton Marcus: Sure, great. that grips her, she becomes. And Nature, that sprung-lidded,

00:26:29.270 - 00:26:52.580

still commodious steamer-trunk of tempora and mores gets stuffed with it all: the mildewed orange-flowers, the female pills, the terrible breasts of Boadicea beneath flat foxes' heads and orchids. Two handsome women gripped in

00:26:52.580 - 00:27:14.480

argument, each proud, acute, subtle, I hear scream across the cut glass and majolica like Furies cornered from their prey: the argument ad feminam, all the old knives that have rusted in my back, I drive in yours, ma semblable, ma soeur!

00:27:15.110 - 00:27:27.200

Of course that last line is a take off on Baudelaire's- Morton Marcus: -to his brother. Adrienne Rich: "Ma semblable, mon frere!" My likeness, my brother, or my likeness, my sister. But you know what

00:27:27.200 - 00:27:53.690

strikes me as I read even this section is that it contains Latin and French phrases, it's three different Latin and French phrases, and in part I was really trying to distance this material by being witty, by being polished, by having it my

00:27:53.690 - 00:28:12.660

command these foreign phrases. This was still a time when to take hold of that material with sort of naked hands was unthinkable for me. Morton Marcus: Well, but to me and this is one of the reasons

00:28:12.660 - 00:28:26.700

that to me, it is a demarcation poem for you and many, many critics have said it, there's a totally different sound here. And there is something that will be developed maybe without the Latin and- but there will continue to be references and

00:28:26.700 - 00:28:44.700

allusions. And that is, the line becomes much more than the language of speech. The metrics really roughen up and become free verse, the rhyme gets tossed out of the window, and you get into the use of phrases and almost telegraphic rhythms,

00:28:45.090 - 00:29:03.900

which will become more and more a part of what you're doing until you suddenly surprise me and turn that all around in, "An Atlas of the Difficult World." And we're into an urgency now, sparks are flying off these words and they're firing off the

00:29:03.900 - 00:29:12.600

phrases and the elegant parlor rooms, maybe even the Schubert we started with, they're no longer here. Adrienne Rich: The Bach! Morton Marcus: The Bach we started with is no longer there.

00:29:13.050 - 00:29:24.630

Adrienne Rich: Mhm, you're right. Morton Marcus: Would you like to read something- there is a poem that you and I have talked very briefly about, which is, "The Roof Walker."

00:29:24.990 - 00:29:33.750

Adrienne Rich: Oh, yes. Morton Marcus: And it is interesting because of- as I told you the feminists definition I heard of this poem, and it can be a number, have a number of different meanings,

00:29:33.990 - 00:29:42.540

and the meaning that I always took it to be, being a male, and let's get to that- Adrienne Rich: But you can have feminist definitions, Mort, even though you're a male.

00:29:42.570 - 00:29:48.360

Morton Marcus: I probably need them, Adrienne. [Laughter] In fact, I know you probably think so! Adrienne Rich: Help yourself to them. Morton Marcus: Thank you.

00:29:51.840 - 00:30:08.370

Adrienne Rich: Well, it's interesting you asked me to read this poem and this poem, it was dedicated to Denise Levertov, who I was- by that time I had gotten to know her, she was living in New York, I was living in Cambridge, Mass. We saw each

00:30:08.370 - 00:30:35.310

other several times a year and talked a lot, talked intensively when we met about poetry, and also about having children, she had a son and I had three sons. And she was the first woman poet I knew who was also a mother. And Denise introduced me to, I

00:30:35.310 - 00:31:01.110

had read William Carlos Williams, but she really brought me into contact with the poets around Williams, with the poets of Black Mountain, with poets like Duncan Crealy, she introduced me to so many poets whose work I needed to know and

00:31:01.140 - 00:31:21.210

which was tremendously valuable for me to know. And this poem is dedicated to her. We used to write letters back and forth arguing about prosody, for example, about the very construction of poetry. She felt passionately that you couldn't

00:31:21.210 - 00:31:36.270

use iambic pentameter anymore, and I felt that they were uses of iambic pentameter still, although I was certainly using it less and less than I ever had. But anyway, this poem is dedicated to her.

00:31:37.260 - 00:31:57.280

THE ROOFWALKER Over the half-finished houses night comes. The builders stand on the roof. It is quiet after the hammers, the pulleys hang slack. Giants, the roofwalkers, on a listing deck, the wave of

00:31:57.280 - 00:32:19.150

darkness about to break on their heads. The sky is a torn sail, where figures pass magnified, shadows on a burning deck. I feel like them up there: exposed, larger than life, and due to break my neck.

00:32:20.740 - 00:32:44.890

Was it worthwhile to lay -- with infinite exertion -- a roof I can't live under? All those blueprints, closings of gaps, measurings, calculations? A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do. I'm naked,

00:32:44.980 - 00:33:06.220

ignorant, a naked man fleeing across the roofs who could with a shade of difference be sitting in the lamplight against the cream wallpaper reading -- not with indifference -- about a naked man fleeing across the roofs.

00:33:08.310 - 00:33:29.250

And of course it's, you know, as I read this aloud now I realized that those closings of gaps, measurings, calculations, speak to the unsealed apertures in that much earlier poem and that this is really, this is a whole other phase, a whole other way

00:33:29.250 - 00:33:38.310

of being in the world, but still a very scary way of being in the world. Morton Marcus: Perilous balance on the roof. Adrienne Rich: Right.

00:33:38.520 - 00:33:53.460

Morton Marcus: And for those out there, what I've been talking about metaphorically is the position of the poet who exposes him or herself naked to the world. And it would be much more comfortable and probably desirable to be sitting reading

00:33:53.460 - 00:34:07.860

the book written by another poet who's teetering upon that roof and yet being very obviously interested and involved because what that naked person is talking about, having made themselves naked, is vitally important to the person reading

00:34:07.860 - 00:34:22.850

the words. Adrienne Rich: But I'd also like to take up that question of, do you just strip yourself naked and stand there, because I think that a lot of poems are misread with that supposition in mind.

00:34:24.200 - 00:34:47.660

It's a complex kind of nakedness, I think that maybe it's a question of integrity or honesty that you want for yourself in your own life, which then penetrates the poetry and it is a stripping off of masks, as you said before we started

00:34:47.840 - 00:35:17.120

talking here. But I feel as if a lot of poems read today as if they were simply the raw materials of a journal, or a very personal intimate letter. And a poem is, afterall, poetry, it's a work of art, it's a construct, it's a fiction, and

00:35:17.120 - 00:35:42.770

it can be all those things and not be a mask. And I think that's what is important to see, that in making it art, you make it truer. But you know, it's not necessarily a work of fact, of documentary fact, it's a work of the imagination, poetry is from

00:35:42.770 - 00:35:58.020

the imagination, it's about the imagination. Morton Marcus: I was smiling before when you were talking about the letters with Denise Levertov because what I was thinking about is, here are two poets who come out of

00:35:58.050 - 00:36:10.100

tremendously formal beginnings including Denise's early life- Adrienne Rich: Right, I know that. Morton Marcus: And what she was telling you was, you got to get free. This is what Williams has taught me, and so people-

00:36:10.100 - 00:36:27.020

because you have worked this way and Ginsberg has worked this way, the early poems of Ginsberg, again, very formal. The people who come after, my young students, think that complete freedom, or just yapping, you know, shocking an

00:36:27.020 - 00:36:41.120

audience is really all that poetry is, and it is not. It is learning very hard the craft of the poem, and that is what allows the imagination to honestly channel through, it gives it a channel.

00:36:41.900 - 00:37:06.080

Adrienne Rich: Oh, I absolutely agree with you. I mean, if it's not going to be taken seriously -- as a craft, as a vocation -- what is the point? It's a life work. It gets harder, don't you find, not easier as you go on. The problems seem to multiply,

00:37:07.040 - 00:37:18.170

the world that has to be interpreted through the imagination -- the life, the existence that has to be interpreted through the imagination -- always seems to get more complicated, it doesn't get simpler.

00:37:18.660 - 00:37:31.260

Morton Marcus: That's of course said by a poet who never has experienced a stasis. I mean, you've always moved on, so it gets more difficult. I have never understood those poets who polish their little piece of wood in the corner, their one

00:37:31.260 - 00:37:48.450

thing where they have two themes and the same forms over and over again, and they're still with us. But it is that that drive, that absolute hunger for an attempt, even if we can never find it, of self definition, of definition, and the complete

00:37:48.450 - 00:38:01.260

flux not only of our national history itself, but in the whole universe itself. All of these things I'm thinking of, poems of yours that have touched on all of these things that make it so much more difficult, and you can fall so much farther because

00:38:01.260 - 00:38:15.810

that roof gets higher and higher and the slope gets steeper and steeper. Now, not in your case, but certainly in my case you feel you have limited tools, your balance is not- Adrienne Rich: Oh, I feel the limitations of the tools all the

00:38:15.810 - 00:38:37.290

time. [Sighs] Yes, because you have your eye on something more, always, I think, it's why you never feel- I never feel that I've really finished a poem, only it's open-ended finally. Morton Marcus: Yeah, abandon this, Thomas said, and you're

00:38:37.290 - 00:38:47.760

never finished with a poem, you abandon them. Adrienne Rich: Yeah. Morton Marcus: Well, we're going right on beyond our time. Do you think we should take a break now or just keep going? Let's just

00:38:47.760 - 00:38:51.990

keep going. Adrienne Rich: All right. Morton Marcus: We'll just wait till- Adrienne Rich: The break at ten o'clock? Okay.

00:38:53.550 - 00:39:07.920

Morton Marcus: Well, why don't we go on. See, the other reading that I talked about in this poem was the reading that here you are admiring the male roofwalkers. And it is an interesting point that it is a naked man who is fleeing up

00:39:07.920 - 00:39:22.910

there. Adrienne Rich: Yeah, I mean, I think there would be real problems with seeing this as a feminist poem unless it- I mean, I've read this to audiences in, you know, later years and said,

00:39:23.720 - 00:39:45.470

I used the term a naked man because in those days, the generic human being was a man, but also can you see the problem, given our uses of language and given the associations, if I had written, "a naked ignorant, a naked woman

00:39:45.470 - 00:40:09.020

fleeing across the roofs." In 1961, that would have felt so tendentious and virtually pornographic and it would have been unheard, it would have destroyed what I was trying to do in the poem, which was really to talk about the art of poetry

00:40:10.310 - 00:40:20.820

and the sense of risk within that art. Morton Marcus: More things from this book that you'd like to read, or-? Adrienne Rich: Well, maybe we should go on.

00:40:20.900 - 00:40:47.090

Morton Marcus: Okay and we go from there to- let me see, you have, it seems to me you come into a real sense of- well, why don't I let you just talk about what you want to talk. How your ideas develop and what you mean. There are things that I want to

00:40:47.090 - 00:40:59.900

get into, but I'll just let you go on. I would really love to hear, for example, a poem like, "Planetarium," in opposition to a poem like, "Orion," which I know in many ways are considered by you companion poems.

00:41:00.950 - 00:41:18.060

Adrienne Rich: Well, they're astronomical poems anyway. I'll read: ORION Far back when I went zig-zagging through tamarack pastures you

00:41:18.060 - 00:41:41.030

were genius, you my cast-iron Viking, my helmed lion-heart king in prison. Years later now you're young my fierce half-brother, staring down from that simplified west your breast open, your belt dragged down by an old fashioned

00:41:41.030 - 00:42:00.020

thing, a sword the last bravado you won't give over though it weighs you down as you stride and the stars in it are dim and maybe have stopped burning. But you burn, and I know it; as I throw back my head to take you

00:42:00.020 - 00:42:20.140

in an old transfusion happens again: divine astronomy is nothing to it. Indoors I bruise and blunder, break faith, leave ill enough alone, a dead child born in the dark. Night cracks up over the

00:42:20.140 - 00:42:39.160

chimney, pieces of time, frozen geodes come showering down in the grate. A man reaches behind my eyes and finds the empty a woman's head turns away from my head in the mirror children are dying my

00:42:39.160 - 00:42:59.980

death and eating crumbs of my life. Pity is not your forte. Calmly you ache up their pinned aloft in your crow's nest, my speechless pirate! You take it all for granted and when I look you back

00:43:00.460 - 00:43:20.530

It's with a starlike eye shooting its cold and egotistical spear where it can do least damage. Breathe deep! No hurt, no pardon out here in the cold with you, you with your back to the wall.

00:43:24.200 - 00:43:40.550

Morton Marcus: Now I don't know what you want to say about that, but to me this certainly could get us into a conversation about your attitude towards males. And there is here, I mean it seems like this- there is a look at an androgynous self in here, and

00:43:40.550 - 00:43:59.640

yet at the same time at the male imagery that dominated your earlier life. Adrienne Rich: Well you know, somebody has said that Orion is a kind of -- I mean I call him my fierce half-brother -- and

00:43:59.640 - 00:44:25.230

then Orion is a kind of projection of what I saw as, in those years, as my, "masculine self," which was the creative artist self, and even the egotistical self. That Orion, the constellation, the hunter up there in the heavens, and that's

00:44:25.260 - 00:44:48.180

been always my favorite constellation, I've always loved it. I've written about it, about him several times in poems, that in this poem he represents a kind of splitting of the self, a projection of the self to this distant masculine, a Jungian

00:44:48.180 - 00:45:16.920

would say archetype. And I think it has a lot more to do with that than with an attitude toward man. I think it's more a perception of the self under the kinds of gender splittings and gender ideologies that I was living under in 1961, living

00:45:16.920 - 00:45:53.850

with, living among, that it was about trying to make myself in some way whole but not really being able to, having to split myself. That the figure of Orion out there is free from the sphere where the woman is bruising and blundering, and

00:45:53.850 - 00:46:16.290

where night cracks up over the chimney, where the domestic scene is shattered, where she's feeling enormous remorse for the lives of those around her because she sees herself as not fulfilling the purely feminine aspect, or archetype, or

00:46:16.320 - 00:46:37.650

whatever you want to call that. And I mean I've written about this since that, I think that we try to become whole human beings, and to divide ourselves into masculine and feminine proportions isn't very helpful, that we have to claim all the

00:46:37.650 - 00:47:02.730

parts of ourselves as much as we can, and not give them names that are gendered. It's my quarrel with the Jungians, it's my quarrel with the kind of men's movements, cliches about reclaiming the wild man or whatever. I mean, it seems to me

00:47:02.730 - 00:47:29.070

that the enterprise, the effort, the project, that as human beings we've got to be about is claiming all of ourselves, not projecting any part of it onto someone else because we can't deal with it, or because we want to deny it, because we're

00:47:29.070 - 00:47:53.550

terrified of it. Because it's our projection of these portions of ourselves on to each other -- whether it is men and women, whether it says white people versus people of color, whether it says gentiles using Jews in that way -- I feel as though

00:47:54.780 - 00:48:07.170

that is what hinders us in our attempts to dialogue with each other, and our attempts to love each other, and our attempts to work together. Morton Marcus: Has this changed for you? I mean, has it come

00:48:07.170 - 00:48:24.840

into this from a period when you were dividing things? Adrienne Rich: Well, I think inevitably I grew up, you grew up, we all grew up with these divisions, they're inherent in the culture. If we get to live long enough, we may be able to

00:48:24.840 - 00:48:38.870

get rid of them completely, that would be my hope. Morton Marcus: What I was doing, probably erroneously, was taking images of this poem and applying it to a poem called, "The Knight," which you wrote early on, and in which it seems to me

00:48:38.870 - 00:48:51.180

you're saying that the problem with the knight in shining armor is that he never gets out of that armor- Adrienne Rich: He never gets out of armor, yes. Morton Marcus: The naked one on the roof, and it is so sad that

00:48:51.690 - 00:49:07.470

even though there is all this glitter, it is all surface glitter, a reflection that the male in Western culture, American culture, but Western culture because of the image of the knight, really does not achieve a fullness, which let's

00:49:07.470 - 00:49:20.720

say the diver will achieve in, you know, diving into the wreck, when you become both male and female, or the speaker becomes both male and female. Adrienne Rich: Yes, and in that poem I said, the knight has to

00:49:20.720 - 00:49:31.040

be unseated, he has to be overthrown, but will they defeat him gently? Morton Marcus: You've got the book open. Do you want to read? Adrienne Rich: I don't have that poem here.

00:49:31.040 - 00:49:51.510

Morton Marcus: If you want to read it, I've got it right here. Adrienne Rich: A knight rides into the noon and his helmet points to the sun and a thousand splintered suns are the gaiety of his mail, the soles of his feet glitter and his palms flash

00:49:51.510 - 00:50:11.640

in reply and under his crackling banner he rides like a ship in sail. A knight rides into the noon and only his eye is living a lump of bitter jelly set in a metal mask, betraying rags and tatters

00:50:11.820 - 00:50:31.050

that cling to the flesh beneath and wear his nerves to ribbons under the radiant casque. Who will unhorse this rider and free him from between the walls of iron, the emblems, crushing his chest with their weight?

00:50:32.190 - 00:50:50.830

Will they defeat him gently, or leave him hurled on the green? His rags and wounds still hidden under the great breastplate? Of course, that poem was written four years earlier, it was written in 1957, before Orion.

00:50:51.020 - 00:51:05.810

Morton Marcus: Yeah, but it seems interesting to me. One of the things that critics have said is that, you know, you really attack men and give unfair pictures of them, but to me, what I see in most of the poems that deal with men is

00:51:05.810 - 00:51:22.670

really a sense, and do correct me, that the male is helpless in the role that he has been given, and he virtually has to be re-educated to a larger picture of himself, as you say, as integrated human being with both female and male self becoming

00:51:22.670 - 00:51:34.770

one beyond the definitions. Adrienne Rich: Well, I think that, for instance, the critic who reviewed my book, my new book, "Atlas of the Difficult World," for the New York Times, seemed put out that I had

00:51:36.540 - 00:51:57.090

sections of that poem which dealt with male violence against women. But in the poem, I say, "I don't want to know these things, but these are the materials, they're part of what I have to live with as a woman. They're part of what I need to

00:51:57.090 - 00:52:10.080

interpret, they're part of what my imagination has to work with, wouldn't choose to have to work with, but must work with, but that's not all." Morton Marcus: And that's all, you keep saying, you say that

00:52:10.080 - 00:52:23.250

from one section to another really. You keep talking to those women who just want to talk to you about how horrible men have been to them. You say I don't want to hear that anymore, we go beyond this, we go farther than this, we can't just mire

00:52:23.250 - 00:52:37.650

ourselves in this angle. Adrienne Rich: I'm not sure that that poem is saying that exactly, but maybe that's what you heard. Morton Marcus: Okay, we will get to that but, anyway, would you

00:52:37.650 - 00:53:01.340

read us another poem and then we are going to take our hourly break and I thought we get into, "Diving in the Wreck," next hour. Adrienne Rich: AUGUST

00:53:03.580 - 00:53:27.370

Two horses in yellow light eating windfall apples under a tree as summer tears apart milkweeds stagger and grasses grow more ragged. They say there are ions in the sun neutralizing magnetic fields on Earth, some way to explain what this week

00:53:27.370 - 00:53:52.000

has been and the one before it! If I am flesh sunning on rock, if I am brain burning in fluorescent light, if I am dream like a wire with fire throbbing along it, if I am death to man, I have to know it. His mind is too simple, I cannot go on

00:53:52.000 - 00:54:14.320

sharing his nightmares. My own are becoming clearer, they open into prehistory which looks like a village lit with blood where all the fathers are crying: "My son is mine!" Morton Marcus: That was Adrienne Rich. We are talking to Adrienne

00:54:14.320 - 00:54:29.170

Rich on this special program of the Sunday night special. I'm Mort Marcus here; we will be back with Adrienne for a another hour and we will be talking about her wonderful new book, "An Atlas of the Difficult World." Stay tuned, we will take

00:54:29.170 - 00:55:08.850

a short musical break now. Joan Zimmerman: You're tuned to KUSP Santa Cruz, Monterey, Salinas, and the Big Sur coast. We're going to return as soon as possible to our special program, which is a two hour program

00:55:08.850 - 00:55:25.950

where Adrienne Rich is joining us in the studio and is being interviewed by Morton Marcus. So stay tuned for the next hour of this two hour program. Some brief announcements: one, a programming announcement coming up at eleven o'clock after the

00:55:25.950 - 00:55:42.450

finish of the interview with Adrienne Rich is Joe Frank, "Work in Progress." It's one of our most unusual radio offerings and it's an audio adventure which is topical, provocative, and at times bizarre. It's an extremely interesting program

00:55:42.450 - 00:56:00.600

which I encourage you to stay on for. Then I have a public service announcement. We just received a call from our student who is representing the coalition to move Colleges Nine and Ten. This is information about a demonstration that will

00:56:00.600 - 00:56:19.980

be at the proposed site for colleges Nine and Ten tomorrow morning at Elfland across from Cowell Health Center, and you are being asked by the coalition to move colleges Nine and Ten. If you feel you share their views go to the university

00:56:19.980 - 00:56:35.580

tomorrow morning around nine o'clock; there will be a demonstration. And now we will continue with music and shortly return to the Saturday night special with Adrienne Rich and Morton Marcus.

00:56:56.430 - 00:57:09.420

Morton Marcus: And we are back with Adrienne Rich, and we are going to leap forward now because the real reason for this program really was the publication of Adrienne's marvelous new book, "An Atlas of the Difficult World," but before

00:57:09.420 - 00:57:18.220

we get into that, I wonder if you would read me a wonderful short poem called, "Delta," and tell us something about it, Adrienne. Adrienne Rich: DELTA

00:57:19.660 - 00:57:42.970

If you have taken this rubble for my past raking through it for fragments you could sell, know that I long ago moved on deeper into the heart of the matter. If you think you can grasp me, think again. My story flows in more than one

00:57:42.970 - 00:58:14.070

direction, a delta springing from the riverbed with its five fingers spread. I wrote that poem as a kind of protest against what we were talking about earlier, the over-biographising of poetry and

00:58:14.910 - 00:58:50.250

the tendency to talk about poems entirely in terms of biography. I think this has a great deal to do with the kind of overall culture of scandal, of instant celebrity, of attention paid more to the trivia of lives than to the larger picture, it's very

00:58:50.250 - 00:59:13.500

reductive. There's been an enormous- there have been a lot of books published in the last ten or fifteen years about poets of the generation slightly older than mine, many of whom, it's true, were alcoholic, had breakdowns, were hospitalized,

00:59:14.550 - 00:59:39.960

some of whom were suicides, but a kind of attention paid to those aspects of their lives as opposed to their creativity, and also at the loss of any examination of poetry within the context of society. In other words, biographies, memoirs

00:59:39.990 - 01:00:10.980

about poets, dealing with them as damaged creatures, perhaps, but not in terms of their capacities to survive or questions of such as class, for example, who gets to be a poet? Who inhabited certain literary worlds? Class, gender, race, all

01:00:10.980 - 01:00:35.940

very crucial questions, and yet you don't see a lot written about poetry within its context, within its social context. And poetry is a social art, it's an art certainly that should be, I believe, lodged in community, with very real questions of

01:00:36.570 - 01:01:00.420

audience, and therefore of privilege. Who is privileged to speak? Who is privileged to be heard? Who is privileged to be published? Who decides? So that very short poem came out of a lot of reactions to what I perceive as a real neglect of

01:01:00.420 - 01:01:10.520

the central questions about poetry. Morton Marcus: I remember your poem about Emily Dickinson that I was just looking for, but couldn't find. I mean, that's the point you make with her, you sort of want her to be left

01:01:10.520 - 01:01:27.080

alone, and you want her- her work to stand. And yet in the book where this happens the most, "A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far," where you really start talking about women of past centuries, women from history, even this century,

01:01:27.080 - 01:01:44.900

Ethel Rosenberg, for example. It's not to rake up the scandalous or the the nostalgic, it seems to me that this is something that you are against. What you want is for them, and not to become heroes either, but to become the real people that

01:01:44.900 - 01:02:04.010

they are, the fact of the doorframe not the metaphor of it. Adrienne Rich: Well, not in the search for heroines, as for heroes, not to idealize, not to hand our power over to these

01:02:04.010 - 01:02:22.760

figures, these strong figures and say they were so strong, they were so wonderful and we can't be that way. I feel as if that kind of handing over power, for women in particular, is a very dangerous thing.

01:02:22.940 - 01:02:34.720

Morton Marcus: Do you think we're doing that with Frida Kahlo right now, would she be one of the most current in this- Adrienne Rich: I feel poor Frida, she's been so commoditized. I would say this is almost a phenomenon of

01:02:34.720 - 01:02:58.840

capitalism, more than of idealism, that Frida has been turned into a commodity and she's a t-shirt, she's a button, she's posters, she's a thousand things and whatever she stands for to any given person who is looking at her art, whether a

01:02:58.840 - 01:03:21.460

woman or a man, they're- I feel as though she's been bought and sold over and over and over again in a way that's very painful, and her suffering has been bought and sold. Morton Marcus: In all, this is sort of encapsulated. There is a

01:03:21.460 - 01:03:39.220

tremendous concern on your part for history, we talked about even the history of this century, the important dates. And in, "A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far," we really now move really into history. What is, therefore, in your

01:03:39.220 - 01:03:59.390

words, the province of memory? What is it to do for you? What has it done for you? Adrienne Rich: Well, memory is very complicated because I think that it's like dreaming. The more you focus on memory as the

01:03:59.390 - 01:04:13.700

more you focus on dreams, the more you seem to remember or the more you seem to dream. You know, there are people who say, well, I never dream, and it's quite possible that they do not ever focus on their dreams or try to focus on their dreams.

01:04:21.890 - 01:04:47.180

There's that fairly old American phenomenon, you know, about- it goes along with the idea that this is a new world, so many people came to this country to build new lives, quote, lives that were going to be different from the oppressive conditions

01:04:47.450 - 01:05:12.890

that they had lived under elsewhere, and then as white people pushed West, there was that other phenomenon of changing your name, and changing your past, and turning up somewhere else as a totally new person, we have the sort of

01:05:12.920 - 01:05:40.070

born-again phenomenon, a cutting off of oneself from one's own continuity -- oh, that was the old country -- and I think that we're beginning perhaps to understand how damaging that is, how the loss of continuity from generation to generation, even

01:05:40.070 - 01:06:04.130

if it's just stories told, has impoverished us, how thin, how shallow we become without memory. And I think that that's true in any individual life. When we start to think that we have made ourselves anew, that's a very dangerous point.

01:06:04.900 - 01:06:19.700

Morton Marcus: You've become much more active in the Jewish part of your heritage. Is that part of this attempt to keep that memory always alive? Adrienne Rich: Yes, it is. And it's also part of what I, you

01:06:19.700 - 01:06:55.040

know, what certainly has been- I mean, my life, my thinking, from the 60s on has been profoundly affected by political movements, profoundly influenced in my work, certainly, my poetry. And the intersection of a kind of reclaiming of Jewish identity by

01:06:55.040 - 01:07:15.680

feminists, by Jewish women who are feminists, and the reclaiming in attempts to rediscover Jewish identity in the Jewish Renewal Movement, for example, has been very, very important to me because it allowed me to look back on my

01:07:15.710 - 01:07:38.930

very similar childhood and see places, locations, actual concrete moments when my Jewish identity was tremendously important to me, except I didn't know what it was. I had no name for that and that was very disempowering.

01:07:41.390 - 01:07:58.220

Morton Marcus: Being a Jewish woman, though, there's almost a contradiction in that and achieving feminine strength because Judaism is such a patriarchal construct. Adrienne Rich: Yes, and that's something that a lot of Jewish

01:07:58.220 - 01:08:12.310

feminists and a lot of women Rabbi have been struggling with very, very intensely and intently. That's absolutely true. Morton Marcus: I just seem to be dancing around, but I do want to

01:08:12.310 - 01:08:28.600

get on to because so much of this comes to fruition in, "An Atlas of the Difficult World," which seems to take all the themes, the landscapes, and exhibit them. I would love you to talk about this new book because if there is, and there

01:08:28.600 - 01:08:43.420

are, Adrienne Rich poems that are my favorites, and some time I hope before this evening is over, you're gonna read, "Diving into the Wreck," which you're probably sick and tired of, this certainly has very quickly become my favorite poem. I would

01:08:43.420 - 01:08:57.340

like to have you read poems from the whole book, but I would like first to talk about this magnificent thirteen part opening poem, which is the title poem of the book, "An Atlas of a Difficult World." Let me tell you something that I've done: I

01:08:57.340 - 01:09:15.850

find myself coming back again and again, reminding myself that the title of this book is not an atlas for the difficult world, but it is -- and this is what we talk about in history -- it is what it is. This is what we have to deal with, it is of the

01:09:15.850 - 01:09:28.060

difficult world. And I think that is a very, very interesting thing for readers out there to keep in mind with everything we've been talking about, with idealizing history, and heroes and heroines.

01:09:28.150 - 01:09:35.890

Adrienne Rich: Well, I'm certainly not proposing that I've got a guide here. Morton Marcus: Right. Adrienne Rich: I mean, this poem is replete with questions, it's

01:09:35.890 - 01:09:59.740

filled with questions. I mean, the poem itself is a huge question. And I guess, the phrase, the title came to me, it sort of swam into my mind about midway through the time when I was writing the poem, and it seemed to come from somewhere, I

01:09:59.740 - 01:10:28.960

don't know where. But I never thought of the poem as a kind of directive. The poem is for me, writing the poem was kind of like mapping, for me, the terrain which I was trying to explore, naming it. And you're right that a large part of the

01:10:28.960 - 01:10:49.930

landscape in this poem is located here on the central coast of California, and some of it in the Bay Area also, but the poem really moves around the geography of this country. And it's trying to look at the meaning of being a citizen and a

01:10:49.930 - 01:11:10.480

woman citizen, specifically in this location, the United States of North America, at this time, the last decade of the 20th century. And I started writing the first section really out of- it was a poem that came out of living fairly close to the

01:11:10.480 - 01:11:29.050

freeway, driving around in the Central Valley, and seeing what I saw, and hearing what I heard, and then voices began to come into the poem. I didn't know where those voices were coming from, they're not all my voice, some of them are men's voices,

01:11:29.050 - 01:11:44.220

some of them are women's voices, but they became very insistent. I didn't know when I wrote this first section that this was going to be a long poem, I only found that out along the way. Morton Marcus: Well, can I just add that for the people out

01:11:44.220 - 01:11:57.870

there first of all, you should just run out and get this book. It's out in hardback and paperback now, beautiful cover and feel of the whole thing. But when you look at it, and what I think you will hear tonight is that these, a lot of these

01:11:57.870 - 01:12:15.210

sections feature long lines, longer lines that I remember you ever writing before in anything, and this certainly is meant as a compliment from me, there is a very, very definite hint of Whitman here and you're taking the mantle. And I think it's

01:12:15.210 - 01:12:25.740

wonderful because there is about Whitman, yes, the masculine but the androgynous as well, and we can never deny that about him. And so- Adrienne Rich: A good gay poet.

01:12:25.000 - 01:12:41.890

Morton Marcus: A good gay poet and a real masculine lover of men, who has just totall integrated both sides o himself, and that's what's s joyous about him to me. An there's the sense of tha bigness is in this poem, an

01:12:42.340 - 01:13:00.370

it's just a delight to read maybe that's the wrong wor because it's so webbed, s mapped with so many arteria highways and byways in it tha meet up, or all of the themes t at you've pursued over the ye rs really meet up and then go on

01:13:00.370 - 01:13:12.820

in different directions. This is your map, this is the map of your life, really. And it's the map of ours, because o the landscape out here, and b cause this is America 1991. A yway, that's all I'l

01:13:13.570 - 01:13:32.190

Adrienne Rich: Well, I'll read the first section. a dark woman, head bent, listening for something -- a woman's voice, a man's voice, or voice of the freeway, night after night, metal streaming downcoast past eucalyptus,

01:13:32.190 - 01:13:53.370

cypress, agribusiness empires, the salad bowl the world, gurr of small planes dusting the strawberries, each berry picked by a hand in close communion, strawberry blood on the wrist, Malathion in the throat, communion, the hospital at the

01:13:53.370 - 01:14:14.250

edge of the fields, prematures slipping from unsafe wombs, the labor and delivery nurse on her break watching planes dusting rows of pickers. Elsewhere declarations are made: at the sink rinsing strawberries flocked and gleaming, fresh from

01:14:14.250 - 01:14:37.050

market one says: "On the pond this evening is a light finer than my mother's handkerchief received from her mother, hemmed and initialed by the nuns in Belgium." One says: "I can lie for hours reading and listening to music. But sleep comes hard.

01:14:37.530 - 01:14:56.850

I'd rather lie awake and read." One writes: "Mosquitoes pour through the cracks in this cabin's walls, the road in winter is often impassable, I live here so I don't have to go out and act. I'm trying to hold on to my life, it feels like

01:14:56.850 - 01:15:19.830

nothing." One says: I never knew from one day to the next where it was coming from: I had to make my life happen from day to day. Every day an emergency. Now I have a house, a job from year to year. What does that make me?" In the writing workshop, a

01:15:19.830 - 01:15:39.330

young man's tears wet the frugal beard he's grown to go with his poems hoping they have redemption stored in their lines, maybe we'll get him home free. In the classroom, eight-year-old faces are gray. The teacher knows which children

01:15:39.330 - 01:15:56.920

have not broken fast that day, remembers the Black Panthers spooning cereal. I don't want to hear how he beat her after the earthquake, tore up her writing, threw the kerosene lantern into her face

01:15:56.920 - 01:16:15.220

waiting like an unbearable mirror of his own. I don't want to hear how she finally ran from the trailer how he tore the keys from her hands, jumped into the truck and backed into her. I don't want to think how her guesses betrayed her -- that he

01:16:15.220 - 01:16:34.960

meant well, that she was really the stronger and ought not to leave him to his own apparent devastation. I don't want to know wreckage, dreck and waste, but these are the materials and so are the slow lift of the moon's belly over wreckage,

01:16:34.990 - 01:16:58.430

dreck, and waste, wild treefrogs calling in another season, light and music still pouring over our fissured, cracked terrain. Within two miles of the Pacific rounding this long bay, sheening the light for miles inland, floating its fog through redwood

01:16:58.430 - 01:17:20.360

rifts and over strawberry and artichoke fields, its bottomless mind returning always to the same rocks, the same cliffs, with ever-changing words, always the same language -- this is where I live now. If you had known me once, you'd still know

01:17:20.360 - 01:17:41.300

me now though in a different light and life. This is no place you ever knew me. But it would not surprise you to find me here, walking in fog, the sweep of the great ocean eluding me, even the curve of the bay, because as always I fix on the

01:17:41.300 - 01:18:02.180

land. I am stuck to Earth. What I love here is old ranches, leaning seaward, lowroofed spreads between rocks small canyons running through pitched hillsides liveoaks twisted on steepness, the eucalyptus avenue leading to the wrecked

01:18:02.180 - 01:18:24.290

homestead, the fogwreathed heavy-chested cattle on their blond hills. I drive inland over roads closed in wet weather, past shacks hunched in the canyons roads that crawl down into darkness and wind into light where trucks have crashed

01:18:24.290 - 01:18:45.780

and riders of horses tangled to death with lowstruck boughs. These are not the roads you knew me by. But the woman driving, walking, watching for life and death, is the same. I'll go on to the second short section.

01:18:47.910 - 01:19:09.030

Here is a map of our country: here is the Sea of Indifference, glazed with salt. This is the haunted river flowing from brow to groin we dare not taste its water. This is the desert where missiles are planted like corms. This is the breadbasket of

01:19:09.030 - 01:19:29.700

foreclosed farms. This is the birthplace of the rockabilly boy. This is the cemetery of the poor who died for democracy. This is a battlefield from a nineteenth-century war, the shrine is famous. This is the sea-town of myths and story.

01:19:30.180 - 01:19:51.150

When the fishing fleets went bankrupt here is where the jobs were on the pier processing frozen fishsticks, hourly wages, and no shares. These are other battlefields, Centralia, Detroit, here are the forests primeval, the copper, the silver

01:19:51.150 - 01:20:10.530

loads. These are the suburbs of acquiescence, silence rising fumelike from the streets. This is the capital of money and dolor whose spires flare up through air inversions, whose bridges are crumbling, whose children are drifting blind

01:20:10.530 - 01:20:30.840

alleys pent between coiled rolls of razor wire. I promised to show you a map, you say, but this is a mural, then yes, let it be. These are small distinctions, where do we see it from is the question.

01:20:40.920 - 01:21:08.040

And I think I'll read the Soledad section and- The sixth day of the Gulf War, I took a drive. By then I knew this was getting to be a long poem and I felt very, very fortunate when the war began that I had this poem going, that it was

01:21:08.040 - 01:21:37.830

underway, that it was in process, because I could then cope with the feelings and the grief, the anger, the frustrations of the immediate situation in the poem in a certain way. And on the sixth day of the war, I think it was,

01:21:39.600 - 01:21:59.610

I took a drive out to the mission at Soledad and back up along Route 101, passed the prison. And passing the prison reminded me of the book, "Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson," and I went back home and I pulled it

01:21:59.610 - 01:22:26.970

out of the book case and began reading those letters, written by that very young man who had, for many years, been in solitary in that prison, who was murdered in prison. And I found to my, perhaps not astonishment, but I found to my excitement that the

01:22:27.360 - 01:22:46.050

letters themselves were so eloquent and the rhythms were so beautiful that they were poetic rhythms, although it was prose, and I began to incorporate sections from the letters into this poem. I did not have to change a word, I simply broke

01:22:46.290 - 01:23:05.940

the lines at the end of the poetic line. Yes, yes. And as I read, I'll try to indicate where it's the voice of George Jackson and not my voice. And the first line is the

01:23:06.600 - 01:23:29.410

dictionary definition of the Spanish word "Soledad." "Soledad = feminine. Solitude, loneliness, homesickness; lonely retreat." Winter sun in the rosetrees. An old Mexican with a white moustache prunes them back, spraying the cut branches

01:23:29.590 - 01:23:50.470

with dormant oil. The old paper-bag-brown adobe walls stretch apart from the rebuilt mission, in their own time. It is lonely here in the curve of the road winding through vast brown fields machine-engraved in furrows of relentless precision.

01:23:51.580 - 01:24:15.010

In the small chapel, La Nuestra Senora de la Soledad dwells in her shallow arch painted on either side with columns. She is in black lace crisp as cinders from head to foot. Alone, solitary, homesick in her lonely retreat. Outside black olives

01:24:15.010 - 01:24:36.550

fall and smash littering and staining the beaten path. The gravestones of the padres are weights pressing down on the Indian artisans. It is the sixth day of another war. Across the freeway stands another structure from the other

01:24:36.550 - 01:24:49.570

side of the mirror- [Comment] and this is Jackson's words: "It destroys the logical processes of the mind, a man's thoughts become completely disorganized, madness streaming

01:24:49.570 - 01:25:09.520

from every throat frustrated sounds from the bars, metallic sounds from the walls, the steel trays, iron beds bolted to the wall, the smells, the human waste. To determine how men will behave once they enter prison it is of first importance to know

01:25:09.520 - 01:25:27.430

that prison." (From the freeway, gun turrets planted like water towers in another garden, outbuildings spaced in winter sun and the concrete mass beyond. Who now writes letters deep inside that

01:25:27.430 - 01:25:40.990

cave?) [Comment] This is Jackson again: "If my instructor tells me that the world and its affairs are run as well as they possibly can be, that I am governed by wise

01:25:40.990 - 01:26:02.170

and judicious men, that I am free and should be happy. And if when I leave the instructor's presence and encounter the exact opposite, if I actually sense or see confusion, war, recession, depression, death, and decay is it not reasonable that I should

01:26:02.170 - 01:26:25.570

become perplexed?" From eighteen to twenty-eight of his years, a young man schools himself, argues, debates, trains, lectures to himself, teaches himself Swahili, Spanish, learns five new words of English every day, chain smokes, reads, writes

01:26:25.570 - 01:26:46.180

letters. In this college of force, he wrestles bitterness, self-hatred, sexual anger, cures his own nature. Seven of these years in solitary, Soledad. [Comment] This is Jackson again:

01:26:47.710 - 01:27:07.180

"But the significant feature of a desperate man reveals itself when he meets other desperate men, directly or vicariously, and he experiences his first kindness, someone to strain with him, to strain to see him as he strains to see himself, someone

01:27:07.180 - 01:27:27.190

to understand, someone to accept the regard, the love, the desperation forces into hiding. Those feelings that find no expression in desperate times store themselves up in great abundance, ripens, strengthen and strain the walls of their

01:27:27.190 - 01:27:50.980

repository to the utmost. Where the kindred spirit touches this wall, it crumbles. No one responds to kindness, no one is more sensitive to it than the desperate man." Shall I read the last section?

01:27:51.070 - 01:28:00.760

Morton Marcus: Oh, yeah, that'll be wonderful. Adrienne Rich: This is the last section of the poem. It's called: DEDICATIONS

01:28:03.720 - 01:28:24.150

I know you are reading this poem late, before leaving your office of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem standing up in

01:28:24.150 - 01:28:45.330

a bookstore far from the ocean on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven across the plains' enormous spaces around you. I know you are reading this poem in a room where too much has happened for you to bear where the bedclothes lie in

01:28:45.330 - 01:29:08.340

stagnant coils on the bed and the open valise speaks of flight but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem as the underground train loses momentum and before running up the stairs toward a new kind of love your life has never allowed. I know

01:29:08.340 - 01:29:29.250

you're reading this poem by the light of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide while you wait for the newscast from the intifada. I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with

01:29:29.250 - 01:29:51.000

strangers. I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out, count themselves out, at too early an age. I know you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick lens

01:29:51.000 - 01:30:11.250

enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on because even the alphabet is precious. I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand because life is

01:30:11.250 - 01:30:31.410

short and you too are thirsty. I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are. I know you are reading this poem listening for something,

01:30:31.680 - 01:30:53.760

torn between bitterness and hope turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse. I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read there where you have landed, stripped as you are.

01:31:02.720 - 01:31:24.320

Morton Marcus: Well, that is a poem! And Adrienne has only read three sections of it. It's thirteen sections in all that I would urge everyone out there to just spend a lot of time with. It is really a wonderful piece of work that really leaves one

01:31:24.320 - 01:31:39.350

speechless, without any good questions for a change. But I also know that this book contains other poems, it is not just this one poem, and I know that you would either like to say some words on that or go on to some other short poems.

01:31:41.850 - 01:32:04.890

Adrienne Rich: Well, I think I'll go on to- Morton Marcus: See how fast this time goes? Adrienne Rich: Yes! I think I will go on to a couple of other poems. We were talking about memory and there is a longish

01:32:04.890 - 01:32:25.560

poem, not as long as the title poem, but there's a very long poem in here called, "Eastern War Time," which has to do with the process of going back in memory to being a young girl, ignorantly Jewish as the poem says, to growing up in the

01:32:25.590 - 01:32:51.840

safe United States of America d ring World War II, duri g the Holocaust, and then try ng to understand, try ng to imaginatively understan the ways in which some o our parents tried to protect us from knowledge that in fact we n

01:32:51.840 - 01:33:23.760

eded to have. And the poem goes n to question and to try to ex lore the role of memory, not on y in understanding ourselves, b t in being able to imaginat vely identify with others. And the- I'll read the last two sec ions of this poem which are

01:33:23.760 - 01:33:51.360

bout memory. And the scene i the first section that I'm goi g to read is the occupied territ ries in Is Streets closed, emptied by force Guns at corners with open mouths and eyes Memory speaks: you cannot live on me alone, you

01:33:51.360 - 01:34:13.140

cannot live without me. I'm nothing if I'm just a roll of film stills from a vanished world. Fixed lightstreaked mute left for another generation's restoration and framing. I can't be restored or framed, I can't be still. I'm here in your

01:34:13.140 - 01:34:33.850

mirror, pressed leg to leg beside you, intrusive, inappropriate, bitter flashing with what makes me unkillable though killed. Memory says: Want to do right? Don't count on me. I'm a canal

01:34:33.850 - 01:34:54.670

in Europe where bodies are floating. I'm a mass grave. I'm the life that returns. I'm a table set with room for the Stranger. I'm a field with corners left for the landless. I'm accused of child-death of drinking blood. I'm a man-child

01:34:54.700 - 01:35:17.560

praising God he's a man. I'm a woman bargaining for a chicken. I'm a woman who sells for a boat ticket. I'm a family dispersed between night and fog. I'm an immigrant tailor who says "A coat is not a piece of cloth only." I sway in the learnings

01:35:17.560 - 01:35:38.350

of the master-mystics. I have dreamed of Zion, I've dreamed of world revolution. I have dreamed my children could live at last like others. I have walked the children of others through ranks of hatred. I'm a corpse dredged from a canal in Berlin, a river

01:35:38.410 - 01:35:58.180

in Mississippi. I'm a woman standing with other women dressed in black on the streets of Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem. There is spit on my sleeve, there are phone calls in the night. I am a woman standing in line for gasmasks. I stand on a

01:35:58.180 - 01:36:27.640

road in Ramallah with naked face listening. I am standing here in your poem unsatisfied, lifting my smoky mirror. Morton Marcus: It seems only natural to proceed now in the shortest two hours in recorded history to "Where do you go from

01:36:27.640 - 01:36:45.010

here?" And hearing those words and hearing those rhythms and knowing what you're doing now, we have to talk about the great Muriel Rukeyser and what direction you're actually taking on, what you're working on.

01:36:46.080 - 01:37:16.020

Adrienne Rich: Well, actually that's one project that I'm very committed to. Muriel Rukeyser was one of the greatest of American poets. She was a woman, a Jew, a fighter for progressive causes all of her life. She has an immense body of work ranging

01:37:16.020 - 01:37:43.710

from short lyrical poems to very large poems, documentary poems, poems about history, political poems, love poems. She was also the biographer of the physicist Willard Gibbs, of Thomas, Harriet, the Elizabethan explorer and navigator, and of

01:37:43.710 - 01:38:04.170

the American presidential candidate, Wendell Wilkie, who ran against Roosevelt, very interesting collection of biographies. She was an essayist, a film maker, she wrote plays, and this enormous body of work is, much of it,

01:38:04.170 - 01:38:26.850

unpublished, and all of which, all that has been published is currently out of print. And a lot of American poets have been feeling that this is a terrible state of affairs. And I'm very happy to say that W.W. Norton will be bringing out a Muriel

01:38:26.850 - 01:38:49.680

Rukeyser reader sometime in 1993, and I've agreed to write a foreword to that or an introduction to that. And there is a short selection from her poetry coming out from TriQuarterly Books, I think next year, so that her work is going

01:38:49.680 - 01:39:09.390

to slowly come back into print. And it's a great treasure of American literature, which is for many reasons, which I won't even attempt to go into here, but I think some of them are very definitely about her gender, and some of them are

01:39:09.390 - 01:39:38.940

very definitely about her politics, and about her fearlessness as a poet and as a writer, her absolute refusal to be boxed in to any particular vogue or category. She's been a hard figure for the categorisers and cannon-makers to accept and

01:39:38.940 - 01:39:48.650

assimilate. Morton Marcus: I think it's done her reputation damage in the way things go because people could not categorize her- Adrienne Rich: That's true!

01:39:48.440 - 01:39:59.130

Morton Marcus: -and could not say that she was this. Adrienne Rich: That's true, therefore they- She was on the Scottsboro case, she can't be a serious poet. Morton Marcus: -and you suffered from that same reputation.

01:39:54.120 - 01:40:10.910

She's got to be a propagandist. Exactly! Exactly. Adrienne Rich: Well, it's that American, United States, North American maybe I can say, peculiar idea that poetry is

01:40:10.910 - 01:40:30.710

somewhere over here and politics is somewhere elsewhere, and heaven forbid they should ever meet. We're I think virtually the only country, the only culture where that is true. But- Morton Marcus: We even translate famous European and South

01:40:30.710 - 01:40:45.210

American poets, but we do not translate their political poems. Adrienne Rich: I think that's often been the case, yeah, yeah. However, I think that she is going to be restored, or at last placed in her rightful place, and that's something that I've

01:40:45.630 - 01:41:00.630

been feeling a great deal of commitment to. Morton Marcus: Did you know, her or have you- Adrienne Rich: I met her once or twice because our paths crossed when we were doing readings in the anti-war movement. It was

01:41:00.660 - 01:41:22.230

largely on platforms. I never really had a personal relationship with her. I envy those who did, and I envy those who had her for a teacher, she was a magnificent teacher. But anyway, that's one project. I'm working on the editorial

01:41:22.230 - 01:41:40.890

collective for "Bridges," a journal for Jewish feminists and our friends, which is published twice a year. It's a magazine which is essentially an anthology in the sense that we believe that the articles are of more than just contemporary or

01:41:40.890 - 01:42:03.510

immediate interest. And we're trying to make those connections between culture and politics, between Jewish identity and feminism, between Jewish men and Jewish women, between Jews and non-Jews that I think we would agree are very necessary and

01:42:03.510 - 01:42:24.750

very essential, especially today. And my major, the major other project in my life is writing a prose book on poetry in politics, or poetry in society, specifically in America, in North America.

01:42:25.110 - 01:42:36.750

Morton Marcus: Did you read some parts of that at Cabrillo? Adrienne Rich: Yes, I did, yes, yes, yes. Morton Marcus: This will be actually- I'm going through formal introductions here, we've let the conversation go is going

01:42:36.750 - 01:42:49.950

to die. This will be probably your fourth book of prose. Adrienne Rich: That's right, yes. Morton Marcus: So, wonderful, and we're coming up. We've got literally five more minutes. And I just want you to do whatever

01:42:49.950 - 01:43:06.780

you want to do, seriously. If you want to read something, if you want to say, and we haven't covered this, in a way we have, but we haven't attacked it directly: what is the importance of poetry in this day and age when you and I find less and

01:43:06.780 - 01:43:16.380

less people are really reading poetry? Adrienne Rich: Well, you see, I am questioning that. Morton Marcus: Oh, good! Adrienne Rich: I am really questioning that. There may be

01:43:16.410 - 01:43:35.040

more people but I don't think that fewer people relatively are reading poetry. I've just been going around giving readings in bookstores in various parts of the country -- in the Midwest, on the East Coast, and the Northwest, and Southern

01:43:35.040 - 01:44:00.810

California, and Texas -- and I'm seeing in these independent bookstores now, these are not the chains of course, very large poetry sections. I am seeing large numbers of people who clearly read poetry and want to come and hear it, and I think

01:44:00.810 - 01:44:21.420

that there's an incredible number of people writing poetry in this country today. People in prison, people in schools, people in their secret retreats, people in groups, people in hospitals. I was reading an article about Sharon Olds , the

01:44:21.420 - 01:44:47.520

poet who teaches a classes in poetry at a hospital on Roosevelt Island. There's an enormous amount of poetry activity going on. If you look at "Poetry Flash," you see the numbers of poetry readings and different kinds of poetry

01:44:47.520 - 01:45:05.520

related activities that are going on just in the Bay Area alone, And then you look at the calendars for other parts of the country, I think that there's an enormous amount happening with poetry. The problem of, you know, the whole question of,

01:45:05.940 - 01:45:25.560

does a book of poems sell the way a best selling novel, or the scandalous memoirs of a of a sleazy politician sell? That's not happening, certainly. But I think that has a lot to do with questions of publishing and distribution, which are not

01:45:25.560 - 01:45:38.270

germane to the public hunger for poetry and the public appetite for poetry. Morton Marcus: Well, it sounds interesting because I as a teacher of poetry get a real sense that my students, for

01:45:38.270 - 01:45:47.260

example, are not reading poetry. They may be writing their own poem, but they do not seem to see a connection. Adrienne Rich: But I'm sure you emphasize that connection. Morton Marcus: Oh, do I ever!

01:45:48.230 - 01:46:00.530

Adrienne Rich: And let me second it in case any of your students are listening, good. Morton Marcus: Yeah, it certainly is something that I can't even understand how you can write poetry, but not really

01:46:00.560 - 01:46:09.030

come to it through the loving of it and the reading of other poets, and even seeing what other poets have done, which I think is- Adrienne Rich: It's absolutely crucial because you really need

01:46:09.030 - 01:46:23.130

to find out what has been done in order: A) not to reinvent a lot of wheels, and B) to find your own voice. Because students have said to me, "I don't want to read other poets, I'm afraid of being influenced." And I say to them, "You are being

01:46:23.130 - 01:46:38.090

influenced. If you can consciously know that you're being influenced, it's better." Morton Marcus: Well, I agree with you. We're running around and people are running around here. Adrienne, why don't you

01:46:38.690 - 01:46:56.930

have maybe one minute more of what you want to leave on the airwaves swimming out into space and we will, alas, call it a night. Adrienne Rich: I think I'll read the last poem in this book, it's

01:46:56.930 - 01:47:23.990

called, "Final Notations," and it's a poem about death which, alas, is something that's part of all of our lives in a very acute way in this day and age, whatever age we are. And I'd like to end with this poem.

01:47:26.570 - 01:47:44.280

FINAL NOTATIONS It will not be simple, it will not be long. It will take little time, it will take all your thought. It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath. It will be short, it

01:47:44.280 - 01:48:03.780

will not be simple. It will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart. It will not be long, it will occupy your thought as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied. It will take all your flesh, it

01:48:03.780 - 01:48:20.740

will not be simple. You are coming into us who cannot withstand you. You are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you. You are taking parts of us into places never planned. You are going far away

01:48:20.830 - 01:48:38.070

with pieces of our lives. It will be short, it will take all your breath. It will not be simple, it will become your will. Morton Marcus: We have been talking with Adrienne Rich

01:48:38.070 - 01:48:54.090

tonight on a special program of the Sunday night special. We have really intended to celebrate her book, "An Atlas of the Difficult World," but what we did was celebrate Adrienne Rich. And I hope you enjoyed the evening as much as I have. This

01:48:54.090 - 01:49:09.570

is Mort Marcus, and I'm talking for Joan Zimmerman, who has been doing the excellent technical stuff on this program. I also want to remind you that tomorrow on NPR's Morning Edition, we will be talking about the Bill of Rights and how it has and has

01:49:09.570 - 01:49:24.900

not worked in its first two-hundred years, this sounds like an extension of the program with Adrienne, and also housing for New York's homeless, as politicians argue over replacing large shelters with small neighborhood facilities. The

01:49:24.900 - 01:49:43.890

people who need them are left out in the cold, a report Monday on NPR's Morning Edition, from 5 to 9am here on KUSP. This is Mort Marcus, I will be talking to you next this Tuesday from 9 to 10. We will have a tape of Gwendolyn Brooks being

01:49:43.890 - 01:49:54.840

interviewed, and then David Thorne, a young local poet who's just had his first book out will be with us for the last half hour of the show from 9 to 10. Adrienne, thank you so much, this will not-

01:49:54.890 - 01:50:00.200

Adrienne Rich: It's been a pleasure. Morton Marcus: Great. This will not be, I hope, the last time you'll be here. Thank you very much. Adrienne Rich: I hope not.