====== Diving Into the Wreck Through Blood, Bread, and Poetry ======
It is easier to bury one's head into the sand than to descend into the waters:
Adrienne Rich's work is purposely and invariably tied to history, both her individual history and global. In her essay, "Blood, Bread, and Poetry," she writes, "By 1956, I had begun dating each of my poems by year. I did this because I was finished with the idea of a poem as single, encapsulated event, a work of art complete in itself; I knew my life was changing, my work was changing, and I needed to indicate to my readers my sense of being engaged in a long, continuing process. It seems to me now that this was an oblique political statement-a rejection of the dominant critical idea that the poem's text should be read as separate from the poet's everyday life in the world. It was a declaration that placed poetry in a historical continuity, not above or outside history" (180).
In her essay, "Split at the Root," she describes her experience coming to terms with various identities. She is able, throughout this essay and in her poetry, to preserve herself in this continuous process of change and coming to consciousness. Contemplating her identity as a Jewish woman, a mother, and later, a feminist and a lesbian, throughout //Blood, Bread, and Poetry,// although written after the "Diving into the Wreck," she provides background, which deepens the reading process while reading her poems. She writes,
"...I found myself, in the late sixties, trying to describe those relations in poetry. Even before I called myself a feminist or a lesbian, I felt driven-for my own sanity-to bring together in my poems the political world 'out there'- the world of children dynamited or napalmed, of the urban ghetto and militarist violence, and the supposedly private, lyrical world of sex and of male/female relationship...an autonomous movement of women was declaring that 'the personal is political'...As a lesbian-feminist poet and writer, I need to understand how this location affects me, along with the realities of blood and bread within this nation...As women, I think it essential that we admit and explore our cultural identities, our national identities, even as we reject the patriotism, jingoism, national" (181-183).
As a women and as an American, there is an internal drive to disregard the identity, or to feel no real sense of any identity to begin with. In this essay and throughout her work, this idea of diving internally in order to create space to be conscious of the way that society has shaped and formed the woman in its image, "Women have understood that we needed an art of our own: to remind us of our history and what we might be; to show us our true faces-all of them, including the unacceptable; to speak of what has been muffled in code or silence; to make concrete the values our movement was bringing forth out of consciousness raising, speakouts, and activism" (182). By taking the dive into the darkness alone, the individual can explore their own identity while gaining a better understanding of how exploring the ignored intersection of identities allow for a coming-to-consciousness. This coming to consciousness provides the individual with power and authority in the ability to see the world clearly, to "close the gap between poet and woman" (182). As she puts more directly in "What Does a Woman Need to Know?", after asking the question of what a woman needs to know in order to become a self-conscious and self-defining human being,
"Doesn't she need a knowledge of her own history, of her much-politicized female body, of the creative genius of women of the past...Doesn't she need to know how seemingly natural states of being, like heterozexuality, like motherhood, have been enforced and institutionalised to deprive her of power? Without such education, women have lived and continue to live in ignorance of our collective context, vulnerable to the projections of men's fantasies about us as they appear in art, in literature, in the sciences, in the media, in the so-called humanistic studies. I suggest that not anatomy, but enforced ignorance, has been a crucial key to our powerlessness...there is no women's college today which is providing young women with the education they need for survival as whole persons in a world which denies owmen wholeness-that knowledge which, in the words of Coleridge, 'returns again as power' (8).
In close readings, there is the idea that a close-reading of poetry can be occur without much background on the historical context or the author. I believe this idea is part of the English & American literary criticism tradition that is based in misogyny and white supremacy, under the veil of a universality to 'great works' of poetry. As Rich writes,
"The poet achieved a 'universality' and authority through tapping his, or occasionally her, own dreams, longings, fears, desires, and out of this, 'speaking as a man to men,' as Wordsworth had phrased it. But my personal worldview at sixteen, as at twenty-six, was itself being created by political conditions. I was not a man; I was white in a white-supremacist society; I was being educated from the perspective of a particular class" (171).
And later,
"I had been born a woman, and I was trying to think and act as if poetry-and the possibility of making poems-were a universal-a gender-neutral-realm. In the universe of the masculine paradigm, I naturally absorbed ideas about women, sexuality, power from the subjectivity of male poets-Yeats not least among them. The dissonance between these images and the daily events of my own life demanded a constant footwork of imagination, a kind of perpetual translation, and an unconscious fragmentation of identity: woman from poet..." (175).
====== Blood, Bread, and Poetry Quotes ======
The following quotations work to highlight Rich's coming-to-consciousness that occured over the years, eventually leading to her reclamation of power and authority outside of the myths that she was taught as a woman in a white, male dominated culture. Through this, she reclaims her ability and position as a woman poet, more specifically a Jewish woman poet, and later as a lesbian radical feminist.
"...When the ideas or forms we need are banished, we week their residues wherever we can trace them. But there was one major problem with this. I had been born a woman, and I was trying to think and act as if poetry—and the possibility of making poems-were a universal-a gender-neutral-realm. In the universe of the masculine paradigm, I naturally absorbed ideas about women, sexuality, power from the subjectivity of male poets-Yeats not least among them. **The dissonance between these images and the daily events of my own life demanded a constant footwork of imagination, a kind of perpetual translation, and an unconscious fragmentation of identity: woman from poet. Every group that lives under the naming and image-making power of a dominant culture is at risk from this mental fragmentation and needs an art which can resist it"** (175).
"The writers I found were Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, and James Baldwin. Each of them helped me to realize that what had seemed simply 'the way things are' could actually be a social construct, advantageous to some people and detrimental to others, and that these constructs could be criticized and changes. **The myths and obsessions of gender, the myths and obsessions of race, the violent exercise of power in these relationships could be identified, their territories could be mapped.They were not simply part of my private turmoil, a secret misery, an individual failure.** I did not yet know what I, a white woman, might have to say about the racial obsessions of white consciousness. **But I did begin to resist the apparent splitting of poet from woman, thinker from woman, and to write what I feared was political poetry...I did find courage and vindication in words like Baldwin's: 'Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity the end of safety,'** (176).
"There is the **falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood.** In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. **The song is higher than the struggle, and the artist must choose between politics-here defined as earth-bound factionalism, corrupt power struggles- and art, which exists on some transcendent plane. This view of literature has dominated literary criticism in England and America for nearly a century.** In the fifties and early sixties there was much shaking of heads if an artist was found 'meddling in politics'; art was mystical and universal, but the artist was also, apparently, irresponsible and emotional and politically naive" (178).
"**To write directly and overtly as a woman, out of a woman's body and experience, to take women's existence as seriously as theme and source for art, was something I had been hungering to do, needing to do, all my writing life. It placed me nakedly face to face with both terror and anger; it did indeed imply the breakdown of the world as I had always known it, the end of safety,** to paraphrase Baldwin again. But it released tremendous energy in me, as in many other women, to have that way of writing affirmed and validated in a growing political community. I felt for the first time the closing of the gap between poet and woman...**As a lesbian-feminist poet and writer, I need to understand how this location affects me, along with the reality of blood and bread within this nation"** (182-183).
Rich, Adrienne Cecile. Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985. Norton, 1986.