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The Voice of the Poet
The Voice of the Poet: Adrienne Rich
THE VOICE OF THE POET
A remarkable series of audiobooks, featuring distinguished twentieth-century American poets reading from their own work. A first in audiobook publishing--a series that uses the written word to enhance the listening experience--poetry to be read as well as heard. Each audiobook includes rare archival recordings and a book with the text of the poetry, a bibliograohy, and commentary by J. D. McClatchy, the poet and critic, who is the editor of The Yale Review .
"Hearing poetry spoken by the poet is always a unique illumination. This series opens our ears to some of the most passionate utterances and enthralling performances ever recorded." --Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize winner, Poetry
"There has been a great need for a well-edited audio series for poetry, with high literary and technical quality. J. D. McClatchy has filled this need with great style." --Robert Pinsky
A remarkable series of audiobooks, featuring distinguished twentieth-century American poets reading from their own work. A first in audiobook publishing--a series that uses the written word to enhance the listening experience--poetry to be read as well as heard. Each audiobook includes rare archival recordings and a book with the text of the poetry, a bibliograohy, and commentary by J. D. McClatchy, the poet and critic, who is the editor of The Yale Review .
"Hearing poetry spoken by the poet is always a unique illumination. This series opens our ears to some of the most passionate utterances and enthralling performances ever recorded." --Seamus Heaney, Nobel Prize winner, Poetry
"There has been a great need for a well-edited audio series for poetry, with high literary and technical quality. J. D. McClatchy has filled this need with great style." --Robert Pinsky
- GenresPoetry
64 pages, Audio CD
First published January 1, 2002
About the author
Adrienne Rich
146 books1,634 followersWorks, notably
Diving into the Wreck
(1973), of American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich champion such causes as pacifism, feminism, and civil rights for gays and lesbians.
A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation in such works as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971). In Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), she continued to experiment with form and to deal with the experiences and aspirations of women from a feminist perspective.
In addition to her poetry, Rich has published many essays on poetry, feminism, motherhood, and lesbianism. Her recent collections include An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995 (1995).
A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation in such works as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971). In Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), she continued to experiment with form and to deal with the experiences and aspirations of women from a feminist perspective.
In addition to her poetry, Rich has published many essays on poetry, feminism, motherhood, and lesbianism. Her recent collections include An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995 (1995).
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
September 28, 2024
"We go to poetry because we believe it has something to do with us. We also go to poetry to receive the experience of the not me, enter a field of vision we could not otherwise apprehend."--Adrienne Rich.
May 8, 2012
This is a recording of Adrienne Rich reading some of the poems from throughout her life accompanied by a little volume of those poems. I'll quote just a few:
Translations
You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language
Certain words occur: "enemy, oven, sorrow"
enough to let me know
she's a woman of my time
obsessed
with Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power
I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn
trying to make a call
from a phonebooth
The phone rings unanswered
in a man's bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
"Never mind. She'll get tired--"
hears him telling her story to her sister
who becomes her enemy
and will in her own time
light her own way to sorrow
ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political
and just one little piece of one:
from twenty-one Love Poems
xvii
No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death...
Power
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation
sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her
power
North American Time
I
When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies' usage
then I began to wonder
II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love
These are the terms
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill
We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended
and this is verbal privilege
What an amazing, brave and insightful person Rich was, and how lucky we are to have her words still standing.
Translations
You show me the poems of some woman
my age, or younger
translated from your language
Certain words occur: "enemy, oven, sorrow"
enough to let me know
she's a woman of my time
obsessed
with Love, our subject:
we've trained it like ivy to our walls
baked it like bread in our ovens
worn it like lead on our ankles
watched it through binoculars as if
it were a helicopter
bringing food to our famine
or the satellite
of a hostile power
I begin to see that woman
doing things: stirring rice
ironing a skirt
typing a manuscript till dawn
trying to make a call
from a phonebooth
The phone rings unanswered
in a man's bedroom
she hears him telling someone else
"Never mind. She'll get tired--"
hears him telling her story to her sister
who becomes her enemy
and will in her own time
light her own way to sorrow
ignorant of the fact this way of grief
is shared, unnecessary
and political
and just one little piece of one:
from twenty-one Love Poems
xvii
No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death...
Power
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation
sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her
power
North American Time
I
When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond borders
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies' usage
then I began to wonder
II
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love
These are the terms
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill
We move but our words stand
become responsible
for more than we intended
and this is verbal privilege
What an amazing, brave and insightful person Rich was, and how lucky we are to have her words still standing.
September 30, 2007
I was cought by suprise when I listen to the CD. I have heard these poems for years. Now I know who to give credit.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews