DIVING INTO MY WRECK

I have been processing the passing of Adrienne Rich.
I have been reading the tributes (flowery but too few outside the literary public...she was more than a brilliant American Feminist Poet...).
I have felt inadequate to raise my hand in memory; to add my story to the accolades already created.
Then, I remembered: we all have something to share that will be valuable far beyond where we place it. Perhaps in cyberspace. Perhaps in a comment passed on at a water cooler. Perhaps in a classroom of kids or adult students. Perhaps in a blog, read in the middle of a particularly tough night.

So, in honor of the fallen warrior-wordsmith, Adrienne Rich, I throw my memories into Space, and wish her Godspeed to the next Incarnation.

I first "met" Adrienne when someone at the Women's Center at Wells College pushed a collection of her poems into my hands. We were working on a wild weekend of arts workshops and wanted to make sure the poets were represented. It was the late 1970s, in upstate New York, outside of Ithaca. (Ithaca, land of Cornell and Ithaca College and the Ithaca Poets. Land where I had just landed--and would later come back as a published poet myself--but not yet. Not yet.) At this point, the idea was simply to saturate Wells College with "women's poetry".

At the time, Wells was an "all women's college"--founded by Henry Wells in the 1800s--the man most remembered for Wells Fargo's beginnings. Wells was where upper class women went to get an incredible education and to stay out of trouble, far from the City and close to Hobart, Cornell and other credible colleges filled with men. But things were changing in the 1970's. Even Wells' women were getting stirred up; liberated; a wee bit rowdy. Women's fairs featuring women's arts and crafts and demonstrations and speeches and performances were becoming der rigeur. We wanted to make sure poetry was on the menu.

Adrienne Rich's work blew my head apart. It wasn't just "women's poetry" with "women's issues" stated boldly and clearly and in plain womanspeak (as was a lot of stuff being published at that point). No, Adrienne Rich's work was complex. Using both modern forms and classic poetics, Adrienne Rich took the hidden lives of silent women and exploded them into academia in a way that couldn't be trivialized. Her work was raging and ranging and took me inside a world of words that had been closed to me. I could "join the boys' club" of poetry in a way that hitherto hadn't been allowed.

(Virginia Woolf wasn't a poet...)

Two years later, the love of my life, almost twenty years my senior and a full-fledged "adult", took me to Ms. Rich's summer reading close by. In a humid, dark room, filled to capacity, on a sweltering mid-week evening, fueled with wine and whatever else wafted by, the audience welcomed Ms. Rich as she took the stage.

Elfin, ageless, walking (even then) with a cane, she explained about her ongoing battle with arthritis, and made jokes about her feeble mobility. Her hair was short, straight, a little raggedy. Her face was sun burned and freckled, but devoid of make-up. She wore only black--but the kind of New York City black that stated: "I am someone worth paying attention to."
Even at the end of August, it seemed appropriate and cool.

Her words tore into me via her mellow voice. I, like most of the audience, was familiar with their impact in print, but this was the living word. This was Spirit. This was something fine and rare and that we would all grow hushed from and want to take home and consider, like a secret gift given by a more secret friend.

 I was high from Adrienne Rich and her performance.

My lover wasn't amused. In fact, suggested I get a ride home with the newly divorced husband of another poet-friend of ours. (I did. We shared a beer. A ride. Adrienne's work .It was enough.)
When I reflect back, it wasn't the heroism of any straight man daring to give a woman a ride home from Adrienne Rich's performance that is so remarkable. (He knew I wasn't a foaming-at-the-mouth radical...)What is remarkable is that he was as moved as I, by the work. He was soaring and wanting to extend the poetry-rush, too.

When I got home, my lover still wasn't amused.

Ironically, two months later, three thousand miles from anyone I had ever loved, I again met Adrienne Rich. This time I had fled upstate New York and was in LaLaLand, trying to prove to anyone still interested, that I WAS a writer; was a real-life artist (Not a poseur!); and that recording and interpreting this life was a worthwhile venture in the world. I was trying to survive on my own--without contacts; without "the System"; without the love of my life--who had decided that I couldn't share what I didn't possess. It was a tough landing.

Adrienne Rich had been invited to the L.A. Woman's Building. The international organization for women in the arts. I had been hired to organize their anniversary celebration and to "anonymously" (for grant reasons) edit their publication--"Spinning Off". As editor and organizer, I got to meet and greet Ms. Rich. She, of course, had a slew of contacts in L.A. and didn't need my wrangling. But we did get to have a short conversation in the space that passed as my office.

She was looking a bit more ragged at this point--the arthritis not doing anything to heal. She had to sit on the edge of a chair. She was still dressed in black--still using the cane--still devoid of make-up. But she had sunglasses and a new haircut. She was still ageless. I was more enamored than ever.

I couldn't tell her about the loss of my love. Or my runaway antics. Or wanting to prove my place and worth in the world, as a writer. But somehow, she read the pain in my eyes--along with the worship, I'm sure. She touched my arm and told me that things would get better. That I needed to write--no matter what. Needed to say the things I saw and felt. Needed an authentic life. Not to give up.

Then, the BigWigs of the Building (yes, even in those most Feminist of Times and Places, there was a hierarchy...)came and whisked her away for a dinner before the reading--a dinner I wasn't invited to. My friends arrived and we sat through the performance, me holding back sobs.

See, Adrienne Rich's words took me down into my own pain--even as she explored and explained her experiences. She brought me to the surface of my own wreck--made me swim away (for a while) and get an extended view, through the waves. She helped me salvage whatever could be taken from those days and use them to create new art. She gave me strength and breath when I couldn't breathe. Mostly, she reminded me of where I had come from. Of home.

Over the years, whenever I could, I would catch a reading or an interview or the newest book. I remember, too, the year one of my poet friends in Los Angeles was nominated for a Lambda Book Award in the same category as Rich. "Yeah, fat lot of chance any of us have against HER!" the poet muttered to me. But, it was said with love.

Of course.

Because, Adrienne Rich's work enabled all of us to keep on writing. About our lives.

May the angels receive you. May you have tea with Virginia and the other writers in that Heavenly
Cafe in the Sky.

Gracias.