Adrienne Rich: “The hermit’s scream,” from What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993)
In this 18-page excerpt from her treatise on the too-often unexplored relationship between poetry and politics, Rich uses the poetry and journals of Elizabeth Bishop, June Jordan, and Audre Lorde to try and understand the ways poems create vital dialogue about our daily lives and our American political situation. Non-violent protest, feminism, police brutality, and the first Gulf War are addressed, among other topics.
Adrienne Rich: “Anne Sexton: 1928-1974,” from On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1995)
In this eulogy for her contemporary, Rich addresses a group of women poets, teachers, and students at a City College of New York vigil upon Sexton’s 1974 suicide. Rich fiercely advocates against the macabre celebration of suicidal women poets that accompanied Plath’s suicide, a decade before, and chooses instead to celebrate Sexton’s poem, “My Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman,” and her choice to read it at a rally against the Vietnam War, as a form of matriarchal, feminist protest now more necessary than ever.
Anne Sexton: “My Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman” from Live Or Die (1966); also available in The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton (1999)
This poem is central to Rich’s eulogy of Sexton, and helps to better illustrate what Rich, and others mean when they try and expand the definition of feminist poetry.
Audre Lorde: “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” from Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (2007)
“But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as human,” says Lorde in this short, lyrical essay that privileges experience and the intelligence of emotion and dreams over Euro/androcentric thinking, in the Capitalist mode. Poetry, she writes, “is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.”
Sylvia Plath: “The Applicant” and “Lady Lazarus” from Ariel (1966)
These are two of the most well-known, and misrepresented poems from Plath’s celebrated, infamous Ariel, a book which Robert Lowell famously (mis)characterized as a suicide note, in his 1966 introduction to it: “In her lines, I often hear the serpent whisper, ‘Come, if only you had the courage, you too could have my rightness, audacity and ease of inspiration.’ But most of us will turn back. These poems are playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder, a game of ‘chicken,’ the wheels of both cars locked and unable to swerve… This poetry and life are not a career; they tell that life, even when disciplined, is simply not worth it.” Consider examining these poems through a feminist, activist lens, opposing the still-dominant idea that they encourage the victimization and martyrdom of women.
June Jordan: “Poem About My Rights” from Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (2005)
This seminal poem from one of Second Wave feminism’s most important poets uses the image of the female body as landscape to examine political questions of race, rape, gender, sexuality, and the post-colonial condition. This is an example of a more overt political poem, which nonetheless employs some of the same feminist/feminine tropes as Sexton and Plath’s work.
Audre Lorde: “Coal,” from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1997)
Probably Lorde’s most famous poem, “Coal” is an example of the ways traditional lyric poetry can be deeply political and activist in nature. “Coal” can be read as an allegory for the Black experience in America and abroad and as a “call to a poetics of Blackness” (Sagri Dhairyam).
Additional Resources
“Vesuvius at Home,” Adrienne Rich
A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
The Wind Done Gone, Alice Randall