Book Review: Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

From the very beginning of her long and prolific career, Adrienne Rich has been one of the most respected contemporary American poets, often voicing criticism of the failings of American culture and politics, especially where feminism and other social issues are concerned, in language that is both fresh and rock solid.

In each of her 24 previous collections of poetry, the first of which, A Change of World (1951), was awarded the Yale Younger Poets prize by W.H. Auden, Rich has never shied away from a fight, and her books have often been sounding boards for her cultural obsessions, namely feminism, Jewish identity, civil rights and pacifism. The technique has served her well: Rich has been crowned with nearly every laurel America gives its writers, including a Guggenheim, a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, an Academy of American Poets fellowship, a MacArthur Fellowship and, most recently, the Lifetime Recognition Award from the Griffin Poetry Prize, among many others.

At the same time, Rich's pugnacious poetic intelligence makes many of her books a thrill to read, poems in which concern for society bubbles just above an impressive knowledge of the niceties of prosody and poetic tradition, as deeply buried yet ever-present as the sunken ship explored in her 1973 poem "Diving into the Wreck."

Indeed, Rich has a formidable reputation for engaging society through poetry, which will make her latest collection, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007-2010, disappointing for those expecting a collection of public poetry. Instead, the book is mostly concerned with literature itself and its ability to act as a mediating factor between the individual and the world.  

More than many of her previous books, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve wears Rich's literary influences clearly and proudly. This is a collection, as the title suggests, very much concerned with poetry's ability to inform, or to serve, life. From the very first poem in the book, "Waiting for Rain, for Music," we see - and hear - Rich's influences loud and clear.

"Burn me some music […] Send my roots rain […] I'm swept/ dry from inside […] Hard winds rack my core// A struggle at the roots of the mind…"

These opening lines contain quotations from Gerard Manley Hopkins and Raymond Williams' study Marxism and Literature, as Rich informs us in the notes section. It is an intriguing juxtaposition and a seamless synthesis of disparate interests, a gesture that is repeated throughout the book, in instances that are sometimes clearly labeled, such as the poem "Reading The Iliad (As if) for the First Time," which contains quotations from Homer's epic poem, or "Benjamin Revisited" which offers a rather pessimistic rejoinder to German cultural critic Walter Benjamin's famous definition of history as a backward-looking angel: "The angel/ of history is/ flown// now meet the janitor[…]," Rich writes.

Elsewhere, Rich's influences are more camouflaged and are likely unconscious to the poet herself. For example, the opening lines of the above mentioned poem, "Reading The Iliad (As if) for the First Time:" "Lurid, garish, gash/ rended creature struggles to rise" bear a striking resemblance to a line from Robert Lowell's 1977 poem "Epilogue," in which he describes his own poems as "Lurid, rapid, garish, grouped."

This is not to accuse Rich of plagiarism, but rather to point out the fact that this collection is a palimpsest of influences that, as a whole, is most concerned with the effect those influences have on the narrator's ability to make sense of the world. Rich's rock-steady foundation in poetic tradition and prosody help her in this task, as is seen in the split-line caesurae employed in many of these poems, which harkens back to the Anglo-Saxon tradition, when poems were based on such caesura combined with alliteration, rather than rhyme.

Most of these poems eschew punctuation, using line breaks to set the language in place and in pace, and in a nod to yet another influence, Charles Olson, one of the poems contains the forward-slash symbol in the middle of lines to demarcate a more minute pause than is provided by traditional punctuation.

Rich's lines, then, carry a great deal of weight, as they are the reader's main guide to the pacing of the poems, both in terms of form and content. A few lines from "Axel, in thunder" from an especially strong series of poems depicting a central character, "Axel," whom Rich describes as a "counter-Muse," shall elaborate.

"Axel, the air's beaten/ like a drumhead here where it seldom thunders// dolphin/ lightning/ leaps// over the bay surfers flee// crouching to trucks// climbers hanging// […] wait out an unforetold storm[…]"

Each of these lines is perfectly measured by breath, allowing the narrative to unwind according to the demands of the storyteller's voice rather than those of grammar and punctuation. There is a strong sense of inevitability to lines like this, as if Rich has incontrovertibly gotten them right.

At other times, however, the phrasal bursts of Rich's language occur so quickly that individual lines and images fail to make a strong impression, as in "Black Locket," in which Rich writes, "Driving the blind curve trapped in the blind alley/ my blind spot blots the blinding/ beauty of your face…"

There are a few poems in this collection that are explicitly engaged with contemporary social issues, and these are some of the strongest in the book. "Ballade of the Poverties" is a fine example of Rich's ability to synthesize her literary and social concerns, utilizing as it does the 14th-century French verse form of the ballade to examine the widening gap between rich and poor: "There's the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted toilet bowl/ The poverty of to steal food for the first time/ The poverty of to mouth a penis for a paycheck/ The poverty of sweet charity ladling/ Soup for the poor who must always be there for that/ […] Princes of predation let me tell you/ There are poverties and there are poverties."

Here we find an unlikely achievement: a poem that is as concerned with perfecting its form as with expressing a difficult social issue. In this way, the best of the poems in this collection both serve and are served: served by poetic tradition and serving readers, providing insight and eloquent expression of the urgencies of our time. Rich's poetry may have mellowed, but it is still capable of caustic, graceful expression. 

Stephan Delbos can be reached at
sdelbos@praguepost.com