The Power of Adrienne Rich by Hilary Holladay

Author:Hilary Holladay [Holladay, Hilary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-11-17T00:00:00+00:00

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In 1971, just a few months after Conrad’s suicide, she published The Will to Change: Poems 1968–1970. Dedicated to David, Pablo, and Jacob, and heralded by a sublime cover photo showing the foamy residue of a crested wave,*3 the collection is both more intimate and more abstract than any of her previous volumes. The title comes from the beginning of a poem by Charles Olson, “The Kingfishers,” a line that also serves as her book’s epigraph: “What does not change / is the will to change.” The formulation so aptly suited Rich’s life in the 1970s that it now seems more hers than Olson’s.

Even though she had written all the poems in the collection before Conrad killed himself,15 the timing of the publication made it feel like a response to his death—and in a way, it was. But just as Leaflets transcends its historical moment during the Vietnam era, The Will to Change rises above her tormented marriage. In poems such as “The Photograph of the Unmade Bed,” which alludes ironically to a luxuriant 1957 photo by Imogen Cunningham, and “Planetarium,” which pays tribute to the astronomer Caroline Herschel, she threaded truths of her life into poems that went beyond her personal experience. Throughout the book she drew on the imagery of dreams, films, and photographs as she wrote about pain, loss, and survival. In a vexed time, she called her readers’ attention to the interconnectedness of all lives and things, as evidenced in the often-quoted lines from the book’s title poem: “We’re living through a time / that needs to be lived through us.”16 And in “Images for Godard,” she stated with blithe certainty that “the notes for the poem are the only poem” and “the mind of the poet is the only poem.” And finally, “the moment of change is the only poem.”17 She would live through the poems that needed to live through her.

Like the great works of Eliot, Yeats, and Stevens, the poems in her new book resist biographical readings, yet also in the tradition of her modernist forebears, Rich is unmistakably present in every one of them. She is present as a woman, a feminist, a furiously engaged mind determined to fashion her own truths out of what she called “the oppressor’s language.”18 The Will to Change emerges as literary feminism; one might even call it high feminism (akin to the high modernism of The Waste Land) in its rendering of a stance at once startling, recognizable, strange, and new.

In his review of Godard’s Pierrot le Fou, Roger Ebert described how “a Godard movie becomes a montage of pure technique; the parts don’t fit together—but they add up to an attitude.”19 The same could be said of The Will to Change. Although the volume contains disparate moments of resolution and revelation, it adds up to an attitude more than anything else—an attitude of severe cynicism dappled with intellectual extravagance and resurgent hopefulness. Having forsworn the tidy poem that easily could be dropped

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