Adrienne Rich

From ArticleWorld

Adrienne Rich has taught at Swarthmore, San Jose State, Columbia and Stanford University, Brandeis, Rutgers, and Cornell. She has also taught in the seek program, a remedial English program for poor black and third world students entering college. As a writer Rich produced such works as Leaflets in 1969. The Will to Change in 1971. Diving into the Wreck which won the 1979 National Book Award and Snapshots of a Daughter-in-law which shows her developing poetic abilities. Rich has received numerous awards for her work including National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2005 for School Among the Ruins.

Background

Rich was born in May 16, 1929 in Baltimore, Maryland. The eldest, her father Arnold Rich was a doctor and pathology professor. Her mother a retired pianist and composer, who gave up her musical career to raise her family. In 1951, Rich graduated from Radcliffe College. In 1953, Rich married Alfred Conrad, a Harvard economist. They moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts where she had three sons in the next five years. Since, 1976 she has lived with the writer and editor Michelle Cliff. She was influenced by the styles of Pound, Williams, and Levertov. She was also learned from the confessional mode made famous by Lowell, Plath, Sexton and Berryman.

Dillard’s poetry

Rich’s poetry is considered to be very accessible and readable. Rich uses free verse, dialogue and interweaving so several voices. Rich’s poetry grows out of the political conflicts and problems of the feminist and anti-war protests of the sixties and seventies. Rich’s poetry is said to be political, polemical, and lyric all at the same time. Her poetry combines a tightly constructed lines characterized by assonance, consonance, slant rhyme and onomatopoeia, with slogans and quotations from anti-war and feminist movement.