The Power of Adrienne Rich

The Power of Adrienne Rich PDF Author: Hilary Holladay
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
ISBN: 0385541511
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 599

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Book Description
The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet. Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of the woman behind the words is equally impressive. Motivated by personal revelations, Rich transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as both architect and exemplar of the modern feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for the many queer women of letters to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich's correspondence and in-depth interviews with numerous people who knew her, Hilary Holladay digs deep into never-before-accessed sources to portray Rich in full dimension and vivid, human detail.

The Power of Adrienne Rich

The Power of Adrienne Rich PDF Author: Hilary Holladay
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
ISBN: 0385541511
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 599

Get Book Here

Book Description
The first comprehensive biography of Adrienne Rich, feminist and queer icon and internationally revered National Book Award winning poet. Adrienne Rich was the female face of American poetry for decades. Her forceful, uncompromising writing has more than stood the test of time, and the life of the woman behind the words is equally impressive. Motivated by personal revelations, Rich transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as both architect and exemplar of the modern feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for the many queer women of letters to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich's correspondence and in-depth interviews with numerous people who knew her, Hilary Holladay digs deep into never-before-accessed sources to portray Rich in full dimension and vivid, human detail.

The Power of Adrienne Rich

The Power of Adrienne Rich PDF Author: Hilary Holladay
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691276374
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice “A comprehensive biography of . . . one of the most acclaimed poets of her generation and a face of American feminism.”—New York Times A major American writer, thinker, and activist, Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) transformed herself from a traditional, Radcliffe-educated lyric poet and married mother of three sons into a path-breaking lesbian-feminist author of forceful, uncompromising prose as well as poetry. In doing so, she emerged as an architect and exemplar of the feminist movement, breaking ranks to denounce the male-dominated literary establishment and paving the way for women writers to take their places in the cultural mainstream. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished materials, including Rich’s correspondence and in-depth interviews with many people who knew her, Hilary Holladay provides a vividly detailed, full-dimensional portrait of a woman whose work and life continue to challenge and inspire new generations.

The Aesthetics of Power

The Aesthetics of Power PDF Author: Claire Keyes
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820333514
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
When still a senior at Radcliffe, Adrienne Rich was selected as a Yale Younger Poet. The judge, W.H. Auden, wrote the introduction to her first book of poems. Thus Rich's career was launched by one of the most distinguished poets of the twentieth century, someone Rich herself admired and emulated. Adrienne Rich's early mentors were men, and her early poetry consequently adopted a strong male persona. In her development as artist, woman, and activist, however, Rich emerged as a leading voice of modern feminism--a voice which rejects a male-dominated world, forcing new definitions of power, new possibilities for women, and profound repercussions for society. In The Aesthetics of Power, Claire Keyes examines the shape and scope of Rich's poetry as it applies to Rich's female aesthetic. Keyes uncovers the process by which Rich embraces, then rejects, accepted uses of power, achieving a vision of beneficent female power. In her early poems, Adrienne Rich accepts certain traditions associated with the divisions of power according to sex. Later, Rich continually defines and redefines power until she can reject power-as-force (patriarchal power) for the power-to-transform, which, for her, is the truly significant and essential power. Surveying Rich's poetry and prose from 1951 to the present, this book traces the development of Adrienne Rich's new understanding of the power of the poet and the power of woman. Sharing Rich's feminist sensibilities, yet at times critical of her more radical positions, Claire Keyes draws a portrait of an artist who was molded by the complex political and social climate of post-World War II America. It is a portrait that reveals the creative growth of an artist, and the personal growth of a powerful and controversial woman.

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution PDF Author: Adrienne Rich
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 039386734X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 488

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Book Description
The pathbreaking investigation into motherhood and womanhood from an influential and enduring feminist voice, now for a new generation. In Of Woman Born, originally published in 1976, influential poet and feminist Adrienne Rich examines the patriarchic systems and political institutions that define motherhood. Exploring her own experience—as a woman, a poet, a feminist, and a mother—she finds the act of mothering to be both determined by and distinct from the institution of motherhood as it is imposed on all women everywhere. A “powerful blend of research, theory, and self-reflection” (Sandra M. Gilbert, Paris Review), Of Woman Born revolutionized how women thought about motherhood and their own liberation. With a stirring new foreword from National Book Critics Circle Award–winning writer Eula Biss, the book resounds with as much wisdom and insight today as when it was first written.

Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974

Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974 PDF Author: Adrienne Rich
Publisher: W. W. Norton
ISBN:
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
Adrienne Rich is a major American poet whose work compels the attention of an ever-growing number of readers. Her most recent book, Diving into the Wreck, was co-winner of the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry. For this new book, she has selected poems that span almost a quarter of a century--twenty-four years of radical inner growth in the poet. She has made herself important to her readers because she shares with them her commitment to that growth. The present selection draws from all seven of the poet's earlier books; it also includes eight poems not published in earlier volumes and thirteen poems written since Diving into the Wreck. Readers familiar with Rich's career will find here poems long unavailable; others, who have come more recently to her work, will discover how deeply, how far back into the past her themes go. Most significantly, the book is not, as she says, "summing-up or even a retrospective"; it is "the graph of a process still going on"--

The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970

The Will to Change: Poems 1968-1970 PDF Author: Adrienne Rich
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393348164
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 91

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Book Description
"The Will to Change is an extraordinary book of poems...It has the urgency of a prisoner's journal: patient, laconic, eloquent, as if determined thoughts were set down in stolen moments." —David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review "The Will to Change must be read whole: for its tough distrust of completion and for its cool declaratives which fix us with a stare more unsettling than the most hysterical questions...It includes moments when poverty and heroism explode grammer with their own dignified unsyntactical demands...The poems are about departures, about the pain of breaking away from lovers and from an old sense of self. They discover the point where loneliness and politics touch, where the exercise of the radical courage takes its inevitable toll."—David Kalstone in The New York Times Book Review

Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry

Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry PDF Author: Adrienne Rich
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393355144
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
A New York Times Critics’ Pick A career-spanning selection of the lucid, courageous, and boldly political prose of National Book Award winner Adrienne Rich. Demonstrating the lasting brilliance of her voice and her prophetic vision, Essential Essays showcases Adrienne Rich’s singular ability to unite the political, personal, and poetical. The essays selected here by feminist scholar Sandra M. Gilbert range from the 1960s to 2006, emphasizing Rich’s lifelong intellectual engagement and fearless prose exploration of feminism, social justice, poetry, race, homosexuality, and identity.

Outward

Outward PDF Author: Ed Pavlic
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452965269
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

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Book Description
The first scholarly study of Adrienne Rich’s full career examines the poet through her developing approach to the transformative potential of relationships Adrienne Rich is best known as a feminist poet and activist. This iconic status owes especially to her work during the 1970s, while the distinctive political and social visions she achieved during the second half of her career remain inadequately understood. In Outward, poet, scholar, and novelist Ed Pavlić considers Rich’s entire oeuvre to argue that her most profound contribution in poems is her emphasis on not only what goes on “within us” but also what goes on “between us.” Guided by this insight, Pavlić shows how Rich’s most radical work depicts our lives—from the public to the intimate—in shared space rather than in owned privacy. Informed by Pavlić’s friendship and correspondence with Rich, Outward explores how her poems position visionary possibilities to contend with cruelty and violence in our world. Employing an innovative framework, Pavlić examines five kinds of solitude reflected in Rich’s poems: relational solitude, social solitude, fugitive solitude, dissident solitude, and radical solitude. He traces the importance of relationships to her early writing before turning to Rich’s explicitly antiracist and anticapitalist work in the 1980s, which culminates with her most extensive sequence, “An Atlas of the Difficult World.” Pavlić concludes by examining the poet’s twenty-first century work and its depiction of relationships that defy historical divisions based on region, race, class, gender, and sexuality. A deftly written engagement in which one poet works within the poems of another, Outward reveals the development of a major feminist thinker in successive phases as Rich furthers her intimate and erotic, social and political reach. Pavlić illuminates Rich’s belief that social divisions and the power of capital inform but must never fully script our identities or our relationships to each other.

Understanding Adrienne Rich

Understanding Adrienne Rich PDF Author: Jeannette E. Riley
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
ISBN: 1611177006
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
The journey of an important feminist writer through poetry, prose, and politics Among the most celebrated American poets of the past half century, Adrienne Rich was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. In Understanding Adrienne Rich, Jeannette E. Riley assesses the full scope of Rich's career from 1957 to her death in 2012 through a chronological exploration of her poetry and prose. Riley details the evolution of Rich's feminist poetics as she investigated issues of identity, sexuality, gender, the desire to reclaim women's history, and what she terms "the dream of a common language." Throughout the book she documents Rich's gradually developing assertion that poetry can create social change and engage people in the democratic process. Interweaving explications of Rich's poetry with analysis of her prose, Riley offers a close look at the development of the author's voice from formalist poet to feminist visionary to citizen poet.

The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977

The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 PDF Author: Adrienne Rich
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393348075
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 76

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Book Description
“Certain lines had become like incantations to me, words I’d chanted to myself through sorrow and confusion” —Cheryl Strayed, Wild “The Dream of a Common Language explores the contours of a woman’s heart and mind in language for everybody—language whose plainness, laughter, questions and nobility everyone can respond to. . . . No one is writing better or more needed verse than this.”—Boston Evening Globe