Hilary Holladay, author of the acclaimed new biography The Power of Adrienne Rich – a New York Times Top Book of 2020 – talks to us about why the iconic American poet was ahead of her time, the story behind the National Book Award-winning breakthrough Diving Into the Wreck, and her upcoming class Reading Adrienne Rich at 92U – 92Y’s new destination for online learning.
In your 92U class, Reading Adrienne Rich, you’ll be discussing the poet’s literary work as well as her life. Where did Adrienne Rich come from? How did her personal life inform her poetry
Adrienne Rich found enormous source material in her family. She was a child of privilege, her father was a prominent pathologist and professor at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and she was given the privilege to learn at his knee. He had hoped for a son, and he didn’t get a son. But he decided to make her a genius, and she had all the materials to be one. They worked together to make her the brilliant young writer she was, but they had a very difficult relationship. It informed her strengths and sorrows throughout her life. In her father, she had the personifications of the patriarchy – she learned so much from him, and she knew it, but as she was developing as a feminist writer and thinker, she knew she had to shake off her patriarchal influences, including his.
Many readers first come to Rich by way of Diving Into the Wreck (1973), but at that point she had published six previous books and undergone a transformation from her early, more traditionally formal poems. What led Rich to Diving Into the Wreck, and why do you think readers continue to respond to it?
She had recently lost her husband – he had committed suicide – and was coming into her own as a feminist. That meant looking at the world through her own eyes, writing from a woman’s perspective, and not buying into the widely held assumption that a male perspective is the only way to write a poem of “universal” meaning and value. Once she embraced a new, feminist vision, she began breaking away from strict form and meter without relinquishing the underlying discipline that came from decades of attending to the music of her chosen art form. By the time she published Diving into the Wreck, she had been writing mostly in free verse for several years, but in this book's title poem, “Song,” “After Twenty Years,” and other poems, she has found just the right voice for her woman-centered subject matter and just the right subject matter for her more conversational writing style. As readers, we respond viscerally to that thrilling union of form and content.
Before tackling The Power of Adrienne Rich, you’d already written extensively about literary figures like Jack Kerouac, Lucille Clifton, and others – what led you to Rich?
My previous biography was of the Beat writer Herbert Huncke. It was so much fun to research and write about this conman and thief whose own writing influenced Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, but for my next biography, I wanted to write about a woman, someone more principled than Huncke was. I was familiar with Rich’s poetry and had followed her career, had heard her read, and I knew her life story would be extremely interesting and challenging. Researching her life and art was an exhilarating education.
What was the most surprising thing that you discovered about Rich while working on this biography?
Hmm. There were so many things. I was surprised to learn that she had a one-night stand with Susan Sontag. But on a more substantive level, I was surprised or, more accurately, amazed at how hard and how relentlessly she worked throughout her life. On her death certificate, there’s a place to list “occupation" and another place for years in that occupation. She is identified as a poet who worked 70 years – 70 years! – in her 82-year lifespan.
What do you hope that participants in your class will come away with in their understanding of Rich?
From her teen years on, Rich intended to be a poet for the ages, someone whose work would long outlive her. With that destiny in mind, she consciously shaped her body of work and made a point of dating her poems so her shifts in style and subject matter could be noted chronologically. The questions we’ll consider in the class will be: What was Rich telling us about the importance of art, poetry in particular? What do the transitions in her life and art tell us about who she was and how she wanted to be seen and remembered? How are her poems and the trajectory of her life story relevant to us today?