Monday, 9 April 2012

life, death, and adrienne

Death of a diamond cutter, RIP Rich
I haven't been writing for a while because things have been somewhat less boring recently. And what, dare you ask, could be diverting me? A holiday to New York? (close) A new shiny internship? (closer) That's right, it's Exam Season! And I've got twenty days to do something about a mound of Greek/Roman/art/Chaucer-related exams that are about to come my way. Oh, joy.

But then I realised that Adrienne Rich had died and nobody had told me. Not even the newspapers or the old reliable Yahoo news.

Nope.

On the 27th of March 2012 everybody had more important things to think about than the death of one very influential feminist (yeuk, says everyone, what a dirty word), and National Book Award-winning poet. And it's not as if she isn't known over here. Far from it. Richy is even on the Leaving Cert course - and once you're on exam papers, well, you've really made it. That's when Caesar knew he really made it: when he made it on to every single one of the past papers of the exam I am about to do. Do being an overstatement. Crawl through is more like what'll be happening.


GO AWAY Chaucer... this is why I can't blog when I'm doing
 exams. Smarmy-looking poets on horses always find a way
 to interrupt

Anyway. Despite making it onto the Irish exam papers and doing her thesis on Yeats, there wasn't a sign of any announcement anywhere near me. There might have been in other parts of the world, but here: zilch. I have just read that the New York Times put her obituary on their front page: on the 28th of March the front page here was likely to be something about the Government or the Premier League.

The only way I finally found out was when someone was writing about her as their hero, and managed to mention that the eighty-two-year-old poet had snuffed it in California only a fortnight ago. And yet every day I'm told about Victoria Beckham trying on her clothes and thinking they're for 'everywoman'. How is that news? HOW? Oh, well. I guess that's why people have blogs. So they can write about something other than Victoria Beckham's fashion line. And yet here I am, wasting my blog talking about her. Oh, well.

So I do care about this. That's why I'm taking time out from Greece in the Dark Age at eleven o'clock on a Monday morning to say hey, Adrienne Rich died, and she was something pretty great. Well. If you like depressing anti-men poetry (and who doesn't?), want to fight your way out of the feminine darkness and into the light, and possibly even have time to complain about a milkman coming up the stairs every single day of your life, then you'll probably think that Andy was a bit special.

And she was. She carved a way for herself and did her own thing. I'd like to compare her to Austen, even though they seem almost like opposites. But Austen made her own kind of sentence for her own kind of novels, away from the rules of that already existed - those of the patriarchal world (according to Virginia Woolf. I can't help it, feminism is on my course). So did Adrienne. She made her own kind of poetry that suited her own needs - and they were the strange needs of a cookie-cutter 1950s housewife-turned activist-turned lesbian power feminist. So she made her own way, too, just like Austen did - except Jane did it in a quieter way.

That's what I thought. Until her death wasn't really mentioned here - so a life escaping silence ended in it.

Here's to Adrienne (Ah-Drienne) and her love-hate poems. Read some - I've shnuck in a sneaky link so you can take a look at Trying to Talk with a Man, Power, Orion, and a whole lot more.

Despite what you've heard (if it's what I've heard, it's that she's the 'Worst Poet Ever', according to, well, everyone I know) Adrienne's actually got a lot to tell you, if you just give her a chance.

Bon Blog!

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