Vox Populi
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Audio: Adrienne Rich introduces and reads “What Kind of Times Are These”
Running time: 2 minutes
~~~
What Kind of Times Are These?
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
~~~~
Copyright © 1995 Adrienne Rich. From Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995 (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 1995). Included in Vox Populi for noncommercial educational purposes only.
Adrienne Cecile Rich (1929 – 2012) was an American poet and essayist who was an important leader in the anti-war, civil rights, feminist, and gender identity movements. Her poetry was recognized early in her career when A Change of World was selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and published when she was only twenty one years old. Many other collections of poetry followed, including two of her most famous: Diving into the Wreck and The Dream of a Common Language. She won many important prizes such as the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (1986) and a MacArthur Fellowship (1994). Rich continues to be one of the most widely read and influential poets of our time and is credited with bringing the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse. In 1997, she famously declined the National Medal of Arts, protesting the vote by House Speaker Newt Gingrich to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
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To quote Rich’s words back at her, the poem What Kind of Times are These is “an exchange of electrical currents through language.” It sends that electrical current through the words of the poet, i.e Rich, to the mind of the reader. And in that electrical current is the energy that helps us confront, comfort, or embrace the world.
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It’s like Rich had a vision of where we are now. Though she certainly knew the wounds of oppression well, as she had written during her embrace of radical feminism in the 1970s and on. Her poetry was often direct and at times scathing: a sort of indictment of mainstream mansplaining, threaded through her work.
A friend of mine introduced me to her poetry, and called her a voice that speaks to the potential power of women to understand and influence our culture. Back then, she was a touchstone for me.
Thanks for her powerful poem embraced here.
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Rich is a necessary poet. Her poems are a corrective to mainstream culture.
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One of my favorites,
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To have you listen at all…
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The distant yet persistent siren in the distance as Rich reads…and her words like a warning bell. Thank you for featuring this great poet. Rich had a tremendous influence on the development of my own political and poetic consciousness.
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As on mine.
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Angele, what about her work influenced you the most?
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To me, Rich exemplifies the will to change (not coincidentally, the title of one of her poetry collections). Instead of remaining “the girl Auden,” a precocious formalist poet and Yale Younger Poet with a safe career in academia, instead of being subsumed and silenced by the demands of motherhood and wifehood as harshly defined in the 1950s, Rich evolved personally and artistically. She embraced new poetic forms (her interpretation of the ghazal makes her verses written and dated in the time of the Vietnam War perennially fresh and gripping). She embraced political protest–local and global–and personal liberation. She embraced new lovers in coming out as a lesbian in her life and art, among other things popularizing the term “compulsory heterosexuality.”
Fundamentally, Rich challenged patriarchy as artist, thinker, and activist. As engaging as her poetry are her essays and her book Of Woman Born, a historical exploration and personal meditation on the crux of patriarchy and feminism (to whom do children belong? who rears them and at what cost? who controls their lives and even the manner of their births? what is the reality of motherhood as opposed to its myth?) It was Rich who introduced me to the fiercely engaged poet Muriel Rukeyeser, who preceded her by a generation, and to Etel Adnan, the Lebanese-born writer whose tragic novel Sitt Marie Rose illuminates the patriarchal and sectarian attitudes that fueled the Lebanese Civil War.
I have many lines of Rich’s poetry in my head, but this exchange that comprises a section of “From an Old House in America” (1974) always comes clear:
…But can’t you see me as a human being
he said
What is a human being
she said
I try to understand
he said
what will you undertake
she said
will you punish me for history
he said
what will you undertake
she said
do you believe in collective guilt
he said
let me look in your eyes
she said
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Spot on, Angele.
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What a fabulously musical, poignant, intelligent, heart-full, haunting poem. How good to hear Adrienne Rich’s voice on this Day of the Dead. Thank you, Michael!
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This poet wrote from a passionate awareness of the invisible structures that defeat us.
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As I was reading it I felt the same yet I knew who wrote it and felt something akin to Deja vi with dread.
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Vu. Damned autocorrect
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This poem describes our time in America so accurately that it takes my breath away.
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