do you grope for poetry

to embrace all this --not describe, embrace staggering in its arms, Jacob-and-angel-wise? ("Collaborations") Let me start by saying that Adrienne Rich is my favorite poet and favorite writer. I studied her work in an undergrad college seminar. My professor was friends with her, arranged a reading for the college and then my seminar class had the honor of having lunch with Rich. I have heard Rich read several times since then (sadly, lunch has never been repeated), most recently just days after 9/11. It was one of the most stirring readings I have ever been to. I also wrote my master's thesis on Rich's work. Oh, and I got my first tattoo, a spider web with a little spider dangling from it, because I find the spider imagery in Rich's older poems so inspiring, particularly the titular poem "A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far." With all that you can understand why I was so excited to read Rich's newest book of poems The School Among the Ruins, Poems 2000-2003. Poems always get better with more than one reading so I read the book through once, frequently re-reading the poem immediately upon finishing it. I then put the book aside for a few days and read it again, slowly and carefully. If you have read Adrienne Rich before, you will not be disappointed with this book. She continues asking the hard questions and looking and seeing and telling. If you have never read Adrienne Rich before, what have you been waiting for? Rich has always been concerned with language and she continues that here. However, unlike the hope that language can be made inclusive, that a common language can be found, The School Among the Ruins has a sadness in it. The sadness doesn't seem to be from a loss of hope in language, but more from a recognition that we are still struggling with the same language demons that promote an us and them mentality, that divide instead of gather together. There is frustration too. In the poem "Tell Me" Rich writes:

From whence I draw this: harrowed in defeats of language in history to my barest marrow This: one syllable then another gropes upward one stroke laid on another never in the making making beauty or sense always mis-taken, draft, roughed-in only to be struck out is blurt is roughed-up hot keeps body in leaden hour simmering

Words and language are powerful and Rich recognizes, has always recognized, "That words can translate into broken bones/That the power to hurl words is a weapon/That the body can be a weapon" (Transparencies). Rich also recognizes that words are not abstract things, they are connected to bodies which are people and people are connected to time and place and culture, "That word and body/are all we have to lay on the line/That words are windowpanes in a ransacked hut, smeared/by time's dirty rains, we might argue/likewise that words are clear as glass till the sun strikes it blinding" (Transparencies). In the poem "USonian Journals 2000," one of Rich's concerns about language is what happens if we begin to be afraid to use it and what are the causes of that fear?

Early summer lunch with friends, talk rises: poetry, urban design and planning, film. Strands of interest and affection binding us differently around the table. If an uneasy political theme rears up--the meaning of a show of lynching photo- graphs in new York, after Mapplethorpe's photos, of sociopathic evil inside the California prison industry--talk fades. Not a pause but: a suppression. No one is monitoring this conversa- tion but us. We know the air is bad here, maybe want not to push that knowledge, ask what is to be done? How to breathe? What will suffice? Draft new structures or simply be aware? If art is our resistance, what does that make us? If we're col- laborators, what's our offering to corruption--an aesthetic, anaesthetic, dye of silence, withdrawal, intellectual disgust? This fade-out/suspension of conversation: a syndrome of the past decades? our companionate immune systems under siege, viral, spread of social impotence producing social silence? Imagine written language that walks away from human conver- sation. A written literature, back turned to oral traditions, estranged from music and body. So what might reanimate, rearticulate, becomes less and less available.

There is much in about politics, love, war. The titular poem made me sob the first time I read it. Its epigraph reads "Beirut.Baghdad.Sarajevo.Bethlehem.Kabul. Not of course here." The poem is a seven part poem about teachers teaching children academics until the bombs start to fall, until the world is torn apart. Then the teachers become other things and the lessons are how to survive, the grade is strictly pass or fail, life or death. Adrienne Rich was born in 1929. And I think, perhaps, she is feeling her age. The concluding poem of the book is an eight part poem called "Tendril." Part eight reads thus:

She had wanted to find meaning in the past but the future drove a vagrant tank a rogue bulldozer rearranging the past in a blip coherence smashed into vestige not for her even the thought of her children's children picking up one shard of tile then another laying blue against green seeing words in three scripts flowing through vines and flowers guessing at what it was the levantine debris Not for her but still for someone?

The sense of incompleteness, of much still left to do and then the concluding question mark leaves everything uncertain. Who was it all for? Who will continue to make the connections, to put the pieces together? It almost feels as though she is holding out her pen, waiting for someone else to take it up where she has left off. Rich may be 75 but I hope she still has more years and poems in her. Perhaps I am partial given my earlier disclosures, but is an important book and Rich an important poet. It is a definite must read for anyone who likes poetry or is concerned with questions of language, politics and meaning.