Date: Wed, 28 May 1997 22:04:50 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-FEM: Adrienne Rich


Charlotte wrote:
>	Adrienne Rich is a poet of women's experience and ideas. She attempts
>constantly to build up a new culture, a revolutionary culture, of women, of
>the oppressed. Her images of women illuminate her themes and experiences. Her
>forms are non-traditional, as are her subjects. She is seeking to bring about
>a change of world, scattering her poems as leaflets, bringing about change,
>creating a new culture, a new society.

I think you eloquently summarized Rich's faith in poetry (or art in
general) to change culture and society. But Rich (along with poets and
artists like her) struggles under the cultural and material conditions that
are not at all hospitable to the idea that poetry can be a partner in
revolution. Rich herself recognizes that. In one of the essays collected in
her _Blood, Bread, and Poetry_, she speaks of how poetry has been reduced
to the status of precious ornament in the United States. It is not as
though nobody writes poems that are political here; it is just that poems
would not have the kind of political effects and functions that Rich might
desire. Poetry is here (as in many other countries) part of "high culture";
things would be different if Rich worked in countries in which poetry is an
integral part of living popular culture. (Rich points to Sandinista
Nicaragua as one of the examples of such countries.)

Yoshie Furuhashi