When I first read Rich’s “USonian Journals,” I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. First, I wondered if the placement signified something as the rest of the sections seemed for the most part in chronological order. Second, the “USonian Journals” is the only section written in prose poetry. I understood these selections better, but I am not exactly sure why. Perhaps I understood because there were more words? Perhaps I understood better because of its location, and I had experienced some of her work already? While I haven’t come to any concrete conclusions, I do think that reading Longenbach’s chapter on Poem and Prose as well as Rich’s essay “Notes toward a Politics of Location” helped me tremendously in looking at the “USonian Journals” in a thoughtful way. 

Longenbach reverences several examples of poets who turned to prose writing when the poetic lines wouldn’t present themselves. In his example of Yeats, Longenbach suggests that “whenever he wrote out a prose version of what he imagined a poem might be, the poem became itself not because of the logical sense of the prose but because a snatch of language in the prose ignited, leading sonically to other words, creating patterns of sound while simultaneously disrupted them” (103-4).  While Rich kept the prose form in the “USonian Jouranls,” I can see her using them as a way of putting ideas into words and then developing those ideas into individual poems. The idea of a journal in itself suggests that these prose poems were originally thoughts on a page, solidifying a moment in time into words on a page, a moment Rich could then explore. Additionally, the dates associated with the “Journals” spans two years or so, before and after Septemember 11, 2001.

If, in fact, Rich began the “Usonian Journals” in the same fashion as Yeats, I can see where images in the “USonian Journals” inspired separate poems. Hints of the “Journals” can be found in “This Evening Let’s,” in which the speaker wished to avoid the topic of country but to focus on the individual, to focus on the just the two of them at that particular moment, in that particular place. This poem seems to echo—as well as counter— lunch with K., in which K. categories their various coworkers and discusses Victorian prose in terms of the industrial revolution. Similarly, I saw residual ideas from “Address,” in which Rich depicts the “mixed metaphor of food,” the blending of replacing Thanksgiving with Christmas. In “USonian Journals,” the speaker ruminates over “how quickly things and people get replaced. Thanksgiving is replaced by Christmas before it has even arrived. The husband is replaced by the speaker when the wife mistakes the speaker’s car for her own.

In addition to Longenbach, Rich’s “Notes toward a Political of Location,” help illuminate the ideas that Rich is hashing out in the “Journals.” Rich says that she needs “to understand how a place on the map is also a place in history within which as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a feminist I am created and trying to create” (64). This investigation of a moment seems to be depicted in the “Journals,” in which violence occurs outside of the restaurant, and she documents her movements. The speaker goes on to take that moment than ruminate on how she would like to show what’s happening, not just the bad stuff but to “see how differently we’re all moving, how the time allowed to let things become known grows shorter and shorter.”

In her desire to slow things down, to record a moment in order to know, Rich seems to struggle with the medium of language, aware of its ability “to ostracize,” “to dissociate,” to “torture,” but also aware of its ability to create a “territory shared,” a commonality that could unite.