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Adrienne Rich

because reasons.

February 24, 2014 by L.S. Johnson

“In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand
there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see
or the child’s older self, a poet,
a woman dreaming when she should be typing
the last report of the day. If this were a map,
she thinks, a map laid down to memorize
because she might be walking it, it shows
ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert
here and there a sign of aquifers
and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map
it would be the map of the last age of her life,
not a map of choices but a map of variations
on the one great choice. It would be the map by which
she could see the end of touristic choices,
of distances blued and purpled by romance,
by which she would recognize that poetry
isn’t revolution but a way of knowing
why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced
wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co.,
mass-produced yet durable, being here now,
is what it is yet a dream-map
so obdurate, so plain,
she thinks, the material and the dream can join
and that is the poem and that is the late report.”

–Dreamwood, by Adrienne Rich

Feedback on Sunday, and a sense of an endpoint in sight for this revision; dark, sad dreams all through the night, that left me restless, with hammering heart and dry mouth; good writing news this morning.  A map of variations on the one great choice.  Had to find it again.

Filed Under: Reading Tagged With: Adrienne Rich, Dreamwood

adrienne rich 1929-2012

March 28, 2012 by L.S. Johnson

There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.

She, too, is in me, and thus in this work.  I have not thought of her in too long.

 

If I could let you know—
two women together is a work
nothing in civilization has made simple,
two people together is a work
heroic in its ordinariness

She was not young, it should have been no suprise, but it felt a blow nonetheless.

I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which our names do not appear.

Filed Under: Reading Tagged With: Adrienne Rich

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