Upon Discovering Adrienne Rich

            In reading Adrienne Rich’s The School Among the Ruins, I immediately picked up the political implications—of varying subjects and degrees—within each of the poems that I have thus far read. Like Merwin, her poems seem to have lyrical quality, one in which you can appreciate the sound of the poem, the images that she evokes without knowing the exact event she references, although a specific event may not serve as the primary focus of every poem. In some poems she references specific events, such as the voting scandal in Tallahassee, FL. In others, she seems to be, like Merwin, seeking answers to impossible questions; however, the questions seem to be different for Rich.

            For Rich, the questions seem to revolve around making sense of the world in which she finds herself and, in the process, drawing political attention to the oppressed, the marginalized. While Merwin investigates memory and distance in his book of poems, Rich seems to use distance in an effort to separate herself from the culture of the location in which she happened to find herself, to don the persona of those marginalized in order to see the world as they do. However, Rich is also marginalized as a Jewish lesbian growing up in the midst of great political turmoil. She realizes that she cannot completely separate herself from the internalized values, moral, etc. with which certain outside forces instilled. Her parents, her location, her education have all influenced her place in the world and how she is expected to view it.  

            In her efforts to take on different perspectives, Rich diminishes the larger implications of global politics and brings the focus back to the individual, advocating personal relationships and the individual over governmental politics. While Merwin’s use of “I” in his poems left me with the impression of a single speaker, Rich’s “I” appears to be more complicated, taking on different personas at various times as she attempts to distance herself from her individual identity to investigate the perspective of others. Despite such a global focus, her poems strike me as intimate, not overtly attacking corporate greed, government power and oppression but in raw whispers. Instead, she focuses on people—their responses and how the poet speaker wishes to be viewed by them. At times, however, the poems seem to express the thoughts of a frustrated speaker in the inability of Man, specifically Americans, to step out of their habits and sense of entitlement to use their voices, to view the world not as a set of stereotypes but as a community of individuals with individual histories, to invest in people instead of things.

            While Merwin’s poetry provided me with a sense of universal connectedness through personal images, Rich seems to be tearing down the universal in order to focus on the individual, creating in me the overall idea that we are all humans and have the same capacity to experience the same emotions but that we are all still individuals that perceive the world in individual ways.