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receiving the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1951 (from judge W.H.
Auden), at the age of 21, Adrienne Rich has not stopped writing
in her distinct voice, with strength and conviction. Rich has
said that her poetry seeks to create a dialectical relationship
between “the personal, or lyric voice, and the so-called
political — really, the voice of the individual speaking
not just to herself, or to a beloved friend, but to and from
a collective, a social realm.” Her poetry and prose are
taught in literature, creative writing, and gender and gay studies
courses across the country and abroad. Her National Book Critics'
Circle Award citation explains: “Rich has captured with
subversive wit, compassion, precision, supple poetics, toughness
and yes, opposition and resistance, what life has been like
in the opening years of a new century. How we’ve been
under siege in insidious ways at home while waging war abroad.
Rich writes of disruption, dislocation, disconnection. But she
is also ravishingly lyrical, inventive, philosophical, sensual.
She makes things whole again.”
Adrienne Rich is the recipient
of the 1999 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award. She
has also been distinguished by an Academy of American Poets
Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Common Wealth Award
in Literature, the National Book Award, the 1996 Tanning Award
for Mastery in the Art of Poetry, and the MacArthur Fellowship.
In 2003, Adrienne Rich was awarded the Bollingen Prize for Poetry.
She is the author of more than sixteen volumes of poetry, including,
Diving
into the Wreck, The
Dream of a Common Language, The
Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001, An
Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991, Collected
Early Poems: 1950-1970, Dark
Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995, Midnight
Salvage, Fox,
and The
School Among the Ruins, as well as the prose book Of
Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution and
What
is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (2003).
Her most recent book of essays is entitled Arts
of the Possible: Essays & Conversations. She edited
Muriel Rukeyser’s Selected Poems for the Library
of America (2004) and has published essays on the letters of
Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, on June Jordan and James
Baldwin, and a preface to Manifesto: Three Classic Essays
On How to Change the World (Ocean Press, Australia, 2005).
Her collection, The
School Among the Ruins, was honored with the National Book
Critics Circle Award and was chosen as one of Library Journal’s
Best Poetry picks of 2004. It was also selected to receive the
2006 San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award (judge, Mark McMorris).
In 2006, Adrienne Rich was awarded the Medal for Distinguished
Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation.
The judges articulated this distinction as follows: “Adrienne
Rich ... in recognition of her incomparable influence and achievement
as a poet and nonfiction writer. For more than fifty years,
her eloquent and visionary writings have shaped the world of
poetry as well as feminist and political thought.” Her
essay on “Poetry
and Commitment” was published by Norton in spring
2007, in a small book with Mark Doty’s introduction at
the National Book Foundation event. Adrienne Rich’s new
book of poems is Telephone
Ringing in the Labyrinth (October 2007).
•••
“Adrienne Rich’s
poems, volume after volume, have been the makings of one of
the authentic, unpredictable, urgent, essential voices of our
time. All of her life she has been in love with the hope of
telling the utter truth, and her command of language from the
first has been startlingly powerful.”
— W.S. Merwin
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