Biographer of Adrienne Rich Discusses the Protean Poet’s Power

‘The Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biography’By Hilary HolladayPrinceton University Press, Paperback Edition, 504 PagesDuring an Interview with Hilary Holladay, the Sun asked why her subject had to be Adrienne Rich and not another poet or another woman writer. Her answer: “I wanted to write about someone who at an early age saw her own life as having great meaning. In 2012, she passed away, and she had not been the subject of a biography.”I found your title interesting. Many biographies are titled “A Life” or something similarly noncommittal. But your title is “The Power of Adrienne Rich.” The title came to me very late in the project. Originally, I had planned to use a phrase from one of her poems, but then I thought about the arc of her life, and that she had written about power a lot, and how she had thought about being in a powerful position as a prominent feminist, to whom women writers turned for encouragement and support. That was really the crux of things for her, and she understood power is ephemeral. It can be gone in a minute. Power comes and goes, and it comes at a price and it goes at a price. So I wanted to alert readers early in the book and throughout it. I think the title makes the book. There are poets who want to remain pure, untinged by political movements or labels, like “feminist.” But Rich went through quite an evolution, starting out precociously under the guidance of her father and then going through all kinds of transformations. Her father had her write out verses of poetry and that got the rhythm of poetry into her system. He wanted her to be a writer for the ages. Of course, writers want to be independent and she had to break free. I don’t know that he foresaw that. The break became definitive at Radcliffe when she became engaged to a man her father didn’t like. And she had other male mentors. She loved William Butler Yeats and Robert Frost, and you can see their influence in her early work. But as she and the feminist movement came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the world became exponentially greater when she was no longer reading exclusively male authors. She was electrified as a woman and a poet who realized her political potential. She switched from using male pronouns, which had been the expected way, to female pronouns writing about her own experience, and in prose in a volume of essays, “A Woman Born.” Many were inspired to write by her example in ways they might not have otherwise.How does she get from being, quite early, the winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize. She’s married, she has children, but that’s not the end of the story.Her radicalization began in 1966 in New York when her husband, Alfred Conrad, became chair of the economics department at City College. Together they became involved in radical politics, helping students of color gain equal access to City College. It broke him. He committed suicide in 1970. Rich was left alone with three sons. She boldly announced a few years later she was feminist, and a few years after that, a lesbian feminist. The changes, the tumult of the time, did not break her. She made something sparkling out of the troubles of her time. She had this incredible openness to the changes that were occurring in society. You do such a fine job of pairing the books of poetry she wrote and how they are reflective of the different stages of her development as a person and poet. That’s hard to do in literary biography, to create a balance between a discussion of the work, and a discussion of the life. Did you find that difficult? It doesn’t look like it from the finished product.Rich wove her life and work together with such purpose. So I felt I was being guided by her art and her life story. Was it difficult? Yes it was, because I didn’t want to read the poetry solely through a biographical lens. Whenever I hit a new collection of her work as I was writing her biography, I would really have to hit the pause button, and do a lot of reading and thinking before I could weave it all into the biography.Mr. Rollyson has published biographies of Amy Lowell and Sylvia Plath.

Biographer of Adrienne Rich Discusses the Protean Poet’s Power

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