Adrienne (Cecile) Rich - Career, Bibliography

Poet, born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. She studied at Radcliffe College, lived briefly in The Netherlands, then taught at several institutions, notably at Cornell from 1981. Based in New York City, she won many awards, and became known for her highly personal poetry, as in Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971–2 (1973). Later works include An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988–1991 (1991) and Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998 (1999).

Career

In 1951, the year she graduated from Radcliffe College, Adrienne Rich received the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, which led to the publication of her first book, A Change of World. Two years later, she published her second volume, The Diamond Cutters, yet it wasn't until her third volume, Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, which appeared in 1963, that she gained national prominence, in part because of the accomplishment of her lyric voice, mostly in free verse, and in part because of her treatment of feminist-related themes. In 1974, her collection Diving Into the Wreck receivved the National Book Award for Poetry; The subsequent A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and some of the late poems in The Fact of a Doorframe (1984) represent the capstone of this philosophical and political position. The award-winning volume An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic (1995) in particular map out discursive spaces engaging private and public histories, and offer powerful examples of ethically engaged, socially committed lyric poetry.

Rich refused the National Medal of Arts in 1997 stating that "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration."

In February of 2003, Rich, along with other poets, in protest of the Iraq War, refused to attend a White House symposium on "Poetry and the American Voice."

Among her many awards are the inaugural, 1986 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the 1997 Wallace Stevens Award of the Academy of American Poets, and the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for School Among the Ruins.

Bibliography

A Change of World (Yale UP, 1951), received the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (Harper, 1955) Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law: Poems, 1954-1962 (Harper, 1963) Necessities of Life (Norton, 1966) Leaflets: Poems, 1965-1968 (Norton, 1969) The Will to Change: Poems, 1968-1970 (Norton, 1971) Diving Into the Wreck: Poems, 1971-1972 (Norton, 1973) (including "Rape"), received the National Book Award for Poetry Poems: Selected and New, 1950-1974 (Norton, 1974) Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (Norton, 1976) Twenty-One Love Poems (Effie's Press, 1977) The Dream of a Common Language: Poems, 1974-1977 (Norton, 1978) On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (Norton, 1979) A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems, 1978-1981 (Norton, 1981) Sources (Heyeck Press, 1983) The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems Selected and New, 1950-1984 (Norton, 1984) Your Native Land, Your Life (Norton, 1986) Blood, Bread and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1986 (Norton, 1986) Time's Power: Poems, 1985-1988 (Norton, 1988) An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems, 1988-1991 (Norton, 1991), received the Los Angeles Times Book Award Collected Early Poems, 1950-1970 (Norton, 1993) What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Norton, 1993) Dark Fields of the Republic, 1991-1995 (Norton, 1995) Voices, translated from the Spanish of Antonio Porchia (Copper Canyon Press, 2003) Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998 (1999) Fox: Poems 1998-2000 (Norton 2001) The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004 (W.W. Norton & Co., 2004), received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry