if the night grew green as sun and moon
changed faces and the sea became
its own unlit unlikely sound
consider yourself lucky to have come
this farConsider yourself
a trombone blowing unheard
tonesa bass string plucked or locked
down by a hand its face articulated
in shadow, pressed against
a chain-link fenceConsider yourself
inside or outside, where-
ever you were when knotted steel
stopped you shortYou can’t flow through
as music or
as air
ii.
What holds what binds is breathis
primal vision in a cloud’s eye
is gauze around a wounded head
is bearing a downed comrade out beyond
the numerology of vital signs
into predictless space
iii.
The signature to a life requires
the search for a method
rejection of posturing
trust in the witnesses
a vial of invisible ink
a sheet of paper held steady
after the end-stroke
above a deciphering flame
2011
NOTES ON THE POEMS
The following section compiles all of the notes appearing in Adrienne Rich’s published books, beginning with Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law in 1963. Her first two books (A Change of World and The Diamond Cutters) appeared without explanatory notes—as did The Will to Change in 1971 and Diving into the Wreck in 1973. A year later, when putting together the 1974 volume Poems Selected and New, 1950–1974, she provided notes for three poems selected from The Diamond Cutters. After that, with the exception of The Dream of a Common Language in 1978, all of her other volumes included some explanatory notes on sources for passages or on works that informed her writing and thinking.
In preparing the contents of The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950–1984, Rich added two new notes that appear here with the date in parentheses. In The Fact of a Doorframe and in Collected Early Poems (1993), she also revised, expanded, or updated some notes, and cut others (she made no changes or provisions for notes for her last book, Later Poems: Selected and New, 1971–2012).
For the present volume I have brought together everything from the original books, using the updated versions where possible and restoring some notes she cut from the volumes of selected poems. Typography and format of the notes is made uniform without omitting any of the information they provided at the ends of the volumes where they first appeared. Where the note on one poem makes reference to another poem in the volume, the updated page reference is given.
The notes created especially for this volume are few, and where they occur, they are given in parentheses. For example, where information on a quoted passage was provided on the copyright page in one of the books, it appears here as a note. In rare instances I added an editor’s note to give publishing information about a particular poem. Finally, rather than reprinting the full text of Adrienne Rich’s original forewords for Poems Selected and New, 1950–1974, The Fact of a Doorframe, or Collected Early Poems, relevant information is briefly quoted in note form.
A CHANGE OF WORLD
Storm Warnings
(In Collected Early Poems 1950–1970, this poem is dated 1949.)
POEMS 1950–1951
(In The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New 1950–1984, Rich noted: [“The Prisoners” and “At the Jewish New Year”] “were ‘lost’ for a long time; I had even forgotten their existence.”)
THE DIAMOND CUTTERS
The Tourist and the Town The pronouns in the third section were originally masculine. But the tourist was a woman—myself—and I never saw her as anything else. In 1953, when the poem was written, a notion of male experience as universal prevailed which made the feminine pronoun suspect or merely “personal.” In this poem, as in “Afterward” (page 16), I later altered the pronouns because they alter, for me, the dimensions of the poem. (1984)
Villa Adriana The summer palace built by the Emperor Hadrian for his favorite boy lover, Antinoüs. In “Antinoüs: The Diaries” (page 125) I let the young man speak for me. (1974)
The Snow Queen Hans Christian Andersen’s tale was the point of departure.
The Diamond Cutters Thirty years later I have trouble with the informing metaphor of this poem. I was trying, in my twenties, to write about the craft of poetry. But I was drawing, quite ignorantly, on the long tradition of domination, according to which the precious resource is yielded up into the hands of the dominator as if by a natural event. The enforced and exploited labor of actual Africans in actual diamond mines was invisible to me and, therefore, invisible in the poem, which does not take responsibility for its own metaphor. I note this here because this kind of metaphor is still widely accepted, and I still have to struggle against it in my work. (1984)
SNAPSHOTS OF A DAUGHTER-IN-LAW
Euryclea’s Tale Euryclea was the old nurse of Odysseus and the first person to recognize him when he returned home from his wanderings. (1974)
Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law Part 4: “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun,” Emily Dickinson, Complete Poems, ed. T. H. Johnson, 1960, p. 369.
Part 7: The lines in Part 7 beginning “To have in this uncertain world some stay” were written by Mary Wollstonecraft in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (London, 1787).
Part 8: “Vous mourez toutes à quinze ans,” from Diderot’s Lettres à Sophie Volland, quoted by Simone de Beauvoir in Le Deuxième Sexe, vol. II, pp. 123–24.
Part 10: Cf. Le Deuxième Sexe, vol. II, p. 574: “… elle arrive du fond des ages, de Thèbes, de Minos, de Chichen Itza; et elle est aussi le totem planté au coeur de la brousse africaine; c’est un helicoptère et c’est un oiseau; et voilà la plus grande merveille: sous ses cheveux peints le bruissement des feuillages devient une pensée et des paroles s’échappent de ses seins.”
(“She comes from the remotest ages, from Thebes, Minos, Chichén Itzá; and she is also a totem planted in the heart of the African jungle; she is a helicopter and she is a bird; and here is the greatest wonder: beneath her painted hair, the rustling of leaves becomes a thought and words escape from her breasts.” The Second Sex, translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, Vintage Feminism Short Edition.)
Artificial Intelligence See Herbert Simon, The New Science of Management Decision (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p. 26. “A General Problem-Solving Program: Computer programs have been written that enable computers to discover proofs for theorems in logic or geometry, to play chess, to design motors … to compose music. … From almost all of them, whether intended as simulations [of human processes] or not, we learn something about human problem solving, thinking, and learning.
“The first thing we learn … is that we can explain these human processes without postulating mechanisms at subconscious levels that are different from those that are partly conscious and partly verbalized. … The secret of problem solving is that there is no secret.”
Always the Same The last line is quoted from D. H. Lawrence, letter to Henry Savage, in The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore, vol. 1 (New York: Viking, 1962), p. 258.
POEMS 1962–1965
(The epigraph from Montaigne on page 165 is from the Essays, Book 1, Chapter 20: “Shall I change, just for you, this beautiful interwoven structure! Death is one of the attributes you were created with; death is a part of you; you are running away from yourself.” Translation by M.A. Screech [Penguin/Allen Lane].)
NECESSITIES OF LIFE
In the Woods The first line is borrowed and translated from the Dutch poet J. C. Bloem.
Mourning Picture Effie is the painter’s daughter, who died young, and the speaker of the poem.
“I Am in Danger—Sir—” See Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward, eds., The Let
ters of Emily Dickinson, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), p. 409. (The poem was first published as an epigraph to Emily Dickinson: The Mind of the Poet by Albert J. Gelpi [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965] under the title “E.”)
Any Husband to Any Wife The title is, of course, a reversal of Browning’s, and the epigraph comes from his poem.
Translations from the Dutch (In Necessities of Life Rich provided two notes for these poems: “These translations are from a group commissioned by the Bollingen Foundation. For criticism and linguistic advice my thanks go to Judith Herzberg, Marjan DeWolff, and Leo Vroman; the final responsibility is of course my own.”
“Anyone who will compare the Dutch poems with my translations will see that I have, deliberately, refrained from imitating rhyme patterns and have in some instances altered metres. I have tried to be faithful first of all to the images and the emotional tone of the poems, and have been unwilling to introduce distortions in order to reproduce formal structure. Much of the onomatopoeic music of the Nijhoff poem is thus necessarily lost. Possibly I have made Hendrik de Vries sound more modern than he actually sounds in Dutch: in ‘Brother’ for instance he uses an old form of the second person singular which corresponds to the English ‘thou.’ But I believe that the inner structure of these poems remains in the translations, and as a poet-translator I have tried to do as I would be done by.”)
LEAFLETS
Orion One or two phrases suggested by Gottfried Benn’s essay “Artists and Old Age,” in Primal Vision: Selected Writings, ed. E. B. Ashton (New York: New Directions, 1960).
Dwingelo The site of an astronomical observatory in Holland.
Charleston in the 1860’s See Ben Ames Williams, ed., A Diary from Dixie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963).
For a Russian Poet Part 3: This poem is based on an account by the poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya of a protest action against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Gorbanevskaya was later held, and bore a child, in a “penal mental institution” for her political activities.
Two Poems (adapted from Anna Akhmatova) Based on literal prose versions in Dimitri Obolensky, ed., The Penguin Book of Russian Verse (London: Penguin, 1962).
Implosions The first three lines are stolen, by permission, from Abbott Small.
To Frantz Fanon Revolutionary philosopher; studied medicine at the Sorbonne; worked as a psychiatrist in Algeria during the Franco-Algerian war; died of cancer at thirty-six. Author of The Wretched of the Earth; Toward the African Revolution; Black Skin, White Masks; A Dying Colonialism.
The Observer Suggested by a brief newspaper account of the fieldwork of Dian Fossey. She more recently wrote of her observations in Gorillas in the Mist (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983).
Leaflets Part 2: “The love of a fellow-creature in all its fullness consists simply in the ability to say to him: ‘What are you going through?’ ” (Simone Weil, Waiting for God).
Ghazals (Homage to Ghalib) This poem began to be written after I read Aijaz Ahmad’s literal English versions of the Urdu poetry of Mirza Ghalib (1797–1869). While the structure and metrics of the classical ghazal form used by Ghalib are much stricter than mine, I adhered to his use of a minimum five couplets to a ghazal, each couplet being autonomous and independent of the others. The continuity and unity flow from the associations and images playing back and forth among the couplets in any single ghazal. The poems are dated as I wrote them, during a month in the summer of 1968. Although I was a contributor to Ahmad’s The Ghazals of Ghalib (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), the ghazals here are not translations, but original poems.
My ghazals are personal and public, American and twentieth-century; but they owe much to the presence of Ghalib in my mind: a poet self-educated and profoundly learned, who owned no property and borrowed his books, writing in an age of political and cultural break-up (1993).
Translations from the Dutch, Russian, and Yiddish (Rich wrote in Leaflets that “The Dutch poems in this book [‘City’ and ‘Dwingelo’] are translations, in the sense that they were derived by me directly from their originals. The Russian poems [‘Two Poems, adapted from Anna Akhmatova’] are adaptations of literal prose versions in the Penguin Book of Russian Verse, and will appear in Poets on Street Corners, an anthology of Russian poetry edited by Olga Carlisle, to be published by Random House in 1969. The Yiddish poem [‘There Are Such Springlike Nights’] is, similarly, an adaptation from a literal version furnished by Eliezer Greenberg and Irving Howe, and will be included in their forthcoming anthology of Yiddish poetry in translation. It appears here with their permission and that of Kadia Maldovsky [sic].”)
POEMS 1967–1969
(The poem “Postcard” on page 289 was first published by W. W. Norton in Poems Selected and New, 1950–1974 in a section titled “Uncollected Poems 1957–1969.” In the Collected Early Poems it was grouped with the poems of Leaflets.)
White Night This poem and “There Are Such Springlike Nights” (page 244) were adapted from the Yiddish with the aid of transliterated versions and prose translations provided by Eliezer Greenberg and Irving Howe, in whose anthology, A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969), these first appeared.
POEMS 1973–1974
From an Old House in America Part 4: The first line is borrowed from Emily Brontë’s poem “Stanzas.”
Part 7: Many African women went into labor and gave birth on the slave-ships of the Middle Passage, chained for the duration of the voyage to the dying or the dead.
Part 11: Datura is a poisonous hallucinogenic weed with a spiky green pod and a white flower; also known as jimson-weed, or deadly nightshade.
THE DREAM OF A COMMON LANGUAGE
(Twenty-One Love Poems was first published in 1976 in a limited edition, designed and hand-printed by Bonnie Carpenter at Effie’s Press, Emeryville, California.)
Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff Some phrases in this poem are quoted from actual diaries and letters of Paula Modersohn Becker, which were shown to me in unpublished translations by Liselotte Glozer. Since then, an annotated translation of the manuscripts has been published by Diane Radycki: The Letters and Journals of Paula Modersohn-Becker (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1980). (1984)
A WILD PATIENCE HAS TAKEN ME THIS FAR
The Images The phrase “moral and ordinary” is echoed from Blanche Wiesen Cook’s essay “Female Support Networks and Political Activism” in her pamphlet Women and Support Networks (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Out & Out Books, 1979).
Integrity To my knowledge, this word was first introduced in a feminist context by Janice Raymond in her essay “The Illusion of Androgyny,” Quest: A Feminist Quarterly 2, no. I (Summer 1975).
Culture and Anarchy The title is stolen from Matthew Arnold’s collection of essays by the same name, first published in London, 1869. The sources for the voices of nineteenth-century women heard in this poem are as follows: diaries of Susan B. Anthony, 1861, and letter from Anthony to her sister, 1883, both from Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Indianapolis and Kansas City: Bowen-Merrill, 1899); Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: Macmillan, 1926); Elizabeth Barrett Browning, letter to Anna Brownell Jameson, 1852, in Frederick Kenyon, ed., The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, vol. 2 (New York: Macmillan, 1898); Ida Husted Harper, introduction to Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4 (1902); Elizabeth Cady Stanton, speech “On Solitude of Self,” in Anthony and Harper, The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, letter to Susan B. Anthony, in Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, vol. 1.
For Julia in Nebraska Epigraph quoted from the Willa Cather Educational Foundation, Historical Landmark Council, marker at the intersection of Highways 281 and 4, fourteen miles north of Red Cloud, Nebraska.
For Ethel Rosenberg Phrases italicized in Part 3, line 6, are from Robert Coover’s novel The Public Burning (New York: Viking, 1977).
Mother-i
n-LawIt has been suggested to me that the lines “I am trying to tell you, I envy / the people in mental hospitals their freedom” add to a stockpile of false images of mental patients’ incarceration—images that help perpetuate their pain and the system which routinely drugs, curbs, “constrains,” electroshocks, and surgically experiments on them. The woman speaking in the poem speaks, of course, out of her own frustration and despair, the lines are bitterly ironic; but I agree with my critics that in a world eager both to romanticize and to torture mental patients, such cliches must be used, if at all, with utmost concern for the realities underlying them. (1984)
Heroines See Gerda Lerner: “The history of notable women is the history of exceptional, even deviant women, and does not describe the experience and history of the mass of women.” (“Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges,” in Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past [New York: Oxford University Press, 1979].)
Grandmothers Part 3: Italicized lines are quoted from Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream (New York: Norton, 1961), p. 39.
The Spirit of Place Part III: Italicized passages are from Thomas Johnson and Theodora Ward, eds., The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958), specifically, from Letter 154 to Susan Gilbert (June 1854) and Letter 203 to Catherine Scott Anthon Turner (March 1859).
Turning the Wheel Part 3: The Hohokam were a prehistoric farming culture who developed irrigation canals in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico between about 300 B.C. and A.D. 1400. The word Hohokam is Pima and is translated variously as “those who have ceased” or “those who were used up.” See Emil W. Haury, The Hohokam, Desert Farmers and Craftsmen (sic) (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1976).
Part 7: The letter is a poetic fiction, based on a reading of Virginia Grattan, Mary Colter, Builder upon the Red Earth (Flagstaff, Ariz.: Northland Press, 1980). Mary E. J. Colter (1869–1958) studied design and architecture in order to support her mother and younger sister upon her father’s death. She taught art in a St. Paul, Minnesota, high school for fifteen years before starting to work as a decorator for the Fred Harvey Company and the Santa Fe Railroad. Soon she was completely in charge of both exterior and interior design of hotels and restaurants from Chicago westward. Her work advanced the movement away from Victorian style toward a more indigenous southwestern and western architecture. At the height of her career she designed eight major buildings at the Grand Canyon, all of which are still standing. She never married. She drew consistently on Native American arts and design in her work, and her collection of Hopi and Navaho art can be seen at Mesa Verde Museum. Colter’s lifework—a remarkable accomplishment for a woman architect—was thus inextricable from the violation and expropriation of Native culture by white entrepreneurs. Yet her love for that culture was lifelong.
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