Lucy Kogler, manager of Talking Leaves, Buffalo, N.Y., and president of the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association, writes about Adrienne Rich, who died a month ago:
Adrienne Rich is survived by her poems, essays and ethos as infused into the collective and individual memories of those who met her, heard her read, read her and used her as example of how to live a life of engagement in the world of poetry and politics.
The first time I heard her read was in Buffalo in the early '80s. On stage in a run-down, defunct movie theater, she and Audre Lourde read to an audience of women and a handful of men. To use a phrase of the time, she spoke truth to power. We sat enthralled.
It gave me solace knowing she was in the world these last 30 or so years creating, ideas such as:
"...yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation."
The next time I heard her read, also in Buffalo, I was a bookseller. I met and talked with her. She mostly sat, walked with a cane, was tiny, radiated a ferocity of spirit and intellect, and spoke with a gentle timbre that belied the radical content of her verse.
Ad. Rich, as I have always thought of her, as if her name defined her function, adding to and enriching our culture, was a radical example of metamorphosis through language: struggling daughter-in-law to liberated lesbian, Yale Younger Poet to elder statesperson in the pantheon of poets.
Let us hear and live her words this April and every month from now on. From "Defying the Space That Separates Us": "We need poetry as living language, something that is still spoken, aloud or in the mind, muttered in secret, subversive, reaching around corners, crumpled into a pocket, performed to a community, read aloud to the dying, recited by heart, scratched or sprayed on a wall. That kind of language."
Amen to all that.
