What Is Found There by Adrienne Rich

Author:Adrienne Rich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

One rainy day in the spring of 1960, the San Francisco poet Robert Duncan arrived at my door, sent to me by our mutual friend Denise Levertov. I had a sick child at home, and we sat in the kitchen drinking tea. My son played fretfully in his high chair, sometimes needing to sit in my lap. Duncan began speaking almost as soon as he entered the house, he never ceased speaking; the fretful child, my efforts with the tea were in another realm from the one whence he spoke. I listened: I had heard much about him from Denise, had read, with difficulty and interest, the City Lights “Pocket Poets” edition of his poems. But I remember only vaguely what he talked about: poetry, the role of the poet, myth. I knew he was a significant experimental poet (and I still think his poetry truly serious and original though occluded in certain ways). It was clear he inhabited a world where poetry and poetry only took precedence, a world where that was possible. My sharpest memory is of feeling curiously negated between my sick child, for whom I was, simply, comfort, and the continuously speaking poet with the strangely imbalanced eyes, for whom I was, simply, an ear.

Later, driving him back to Boston in the rain, I realized my car was running on empty. Nervously, I eased it out of rush-hour traffic into a filling station. Duncan continued to talk, the monologue, perhaps, of a gifted talker, which can be started up, like a record, when the person doesn’t know what to say.

I have thought since then that Duncan’s deep attachment to a mythological Feminine and to his own childhood may have made it unlikely for him to meet—in any real sense—so unarchetypal a person as an actual struggling woman poet caring for a sick child. But also, Duncan was then trying to write—against the political and poetic tenor of the times, and through the medieval-nostalgic filter of his own vision—openly gay poetry. Like Gertrude Stein, I’m sure he needed the veil of language, and of a highly discursive personality, that could at times be switched off but that also could be used as protection. I too was using my poetic language as protection in those years, as a woman, angry, feeling herself evil, other. A conversation between two such poets was not possible, on that rainy afternoon.

And yet, Duncan was the poet who had recently written, or was about to write, “Working in words I am an escapist; as if I could step out of my clothes and move naked as the wind in a world of words. But I want every part of the actual world involved in my escape,” and

For this is the company of the living

and the poet’s voice speaks from no

crevice in the ground between

 mid-earth and underworld

breathing fumes of what is deadly to know,

   news larvae in tombs

 and twists of time do feed upon,

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