Adrienne Rich: April 25, 1974

The Poetry Center presents Adrienne Rich, in this rare early color-video recording. Rich, in a solo feature program, reads, in addition to other poems, from her book Diving Into The Wreck: Poems 1971–1972 (W. W. Norton & Company, 1973), for which she divided with Allen Ginsberg, and his Fall of America, the National Book Award for Poetry (1974). Rich's reading takes place in the large main sanctuary at the First Unitarian Church, on Franklin and Geary, in San Francisco. On a visit west, several years prior to her and her partner Michelle Cliff moving to live in Santa Cruz, CA, Rich is introduced to the audience by Poetry Center director, Kathleen Fraser. 

Note: there is an abrupt end to the video, per the original recording, as Rich returns to the podium following the applause to ask for questions from the audience.

Publisher
American Poetry Archives
Location
First Unitarian Church, San Francisco
Date
1974-04-25
Event Run Time
00:53:18
Contributors
Kathleen Fraser
Rights

©© American Poetry Archives. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. For all other uses please email poetry@sfsu.edu.

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Adrienne Rich (00:49:03)

Adrienne Rich opens by noting she's been nervous before two readings that year: for the National Women's Poetry Festival in Amherst, Mass., and here, as San Francisco poetry audiences "have a reputation." Rich notes she'll read from Diving Into the Wreck, then newer poems, and opens with "Incipience," saying it was written for her sister. She then introduces and reads "When We Dead Awaken," and "The Stranger," noting this poem has been used in ways she didn't like, and returning after the poem to interrogate contemporary uses of the word "androgyne." She reads "Dialogue," "August," then the longer poem, "The Phenomenology of Anger," all from Diving Into the Wreck.

Rich then turns to new poems, noting these are mostly unpublished (all appear in the posthumous Collected Poems, 1950–2012, under "Poems (1973–1974)"). She introduces and reads "Family Romance (the brothers speak)," "Essential Resources," "For L.G., Unseen for Twenty Years" (she notes "L.G. are not this man's initials"), "White Night," and "Re-forming the Crystal." She closes with the long poem "From an Old House in America," noting that the poem contains a citation from Emily Bronte, reference to the hallucinatory powers of the datura flower, and reminding her audience of brutalities suffered by black women in particular during the Atlantic slave trade; the 16-part poem ends with Rich's turn on John Donne's Meditation XVII, rendered as "Any woman's death diminishes me."

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