Poet & Essayist
First United Methodist Church
February 8, 1999
Biography
Selected Works
Links

Biography
Rich was born in Baltimore in 1929 to a Jewish-Protestant middle-class family. Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1951. Rich was twenty-one, and her work was invested in the formalism that characterized the canonical tradition of Eliot, Yeats, Frost and Auden. Rich's third book of poems, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1972), however, marked a dramatic change. Rich shifted to a free verse line, and launched on what would become a career of poetry that demanded consciousness and self-interrogation of writer and reader, and an implacable critique of social injustice.

Rich entered her most influential period: as a feminist and a lesbian she spoke out for equality for women, gays, and those disenfranchised by race and class. In 1971 Rich delivered a speech to the Modern Language Association, entitled "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision," in which she challenged many assumptions of traditional literary scholarship with regard to women writers. The essay is now considered to be a benchmark text in the admittance of feminist criticism and women's studies into academia.

Rich's poetry became increasingly concerned with naming what she saw as the truth. In her now classic poem "Diving into the Wreck" (1972), Rich seeks "the thing I came for:/the wreck and not the story of the wreck/the thing itself and not the myth. . . ." She describes her own work as seeking the dialectic between "the personal, or lyric voice and the so called political—really, the voice of the individual speaking not just to herself, or to a beloved friend, but to and from a collective, a social realm."

Throughout her career Rich has been wreathed in literary accolades, including the 1996 Tanning Award, the National Book Award, a couple of Guggenheims and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1997, Rich declined a National Medal for the Arts. Not surprisingly, her integrity and convictions prompted her response to the National Endowment for the Arts and to President Clinton: ". . . I do know that art . . . means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage. The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored." Rich's work serves as a Geiger counter of social crisis. She continues to remind us of the transformative power of art and artists: "Art is both tough and fragile. It speaks of what we long to hear and what we dread to find."

Selected Works
A Change of World (1951)
The Diamond Cutters (1955)
Leaflets, Poems: 1965-1968 (1969)
Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law (1970)
The Will To Change Poems 1968-1970 (1971)
Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976)
The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950-1984 (1984)
Your Native Land, Your Life (1986)
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985 (1986)
What Is Found There (1993)
Collected Early Poems, 1950-1970 (1993)
Midnight Salvage (1999)
Arts of the Possible (2001)
Fox: Poems 1998 - 2000 (2001)

Web Site Links
Academy of American Poets page on Rich
Interview with Rich
Boston Phoenix interview with Rich
Listen to Rich on Salon.com