PFA Transcript for Episode 33: Adrienne Rich, “Power” Abram: Hello, I’m Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And I’m Joanne Diaz. Abram: And this is Poetry for All. Joanne: In this podcast, we read a poem, discuss it, learn from it, and then read it one more time. Abram: Today, we’re delighted to have Stephanie Burt as our guest. Stephanie Burt has been described as one of the most influential poetry critics of her generation. In addition to her own books of poetry, she has several works of criticism and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for her work. Her latest book is called _Don’t Read Poetry,_ a book about how to read poems, which does exactly what we hope to do in this podcast: introduce to a very broad audience ways of reading, understanding, enjoying, and entering into great poems from throughout the ages. We’re so delighted to have Stephanie Burt join us today, thank[a] you for being here. Stephanie: Thank you so much, it’s really an honor to be here. Abram: You end the book with two poems in particular that you love and that you think exemplify lots of different ways of entering into poems. One is this poem by Adrienne Rich called “Power.” And that’s the poem we’d love to talk about in more depth today. Would you do us the honor of reading it? Stephanie: This poem first appeared in a book in 1978 [“Power” from _The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977_ (Norton, 1978)] Abram: Thank you. So, those who are listening will not have the poem necessarily in front of them. So I think it’s important to point out that it’s four stanzas long, each of them different lengths and the first stanza is just this first line: “living in the earth-deposits of our history.” What do you make of that first line as a kind of intro to this poem? Stephanie: Well first, since you’re describing graphic form, I would add that Rich did something that was by no means unheard of, but fairly unusual for poetry from her era, which is that she put in these giant midline spaces. They’re the kind of spaces you normally see in Anglo-Saxon poetry. When it appears on the page that indicates a pause that is structurally important to that line. But that doesn’t rise to the level of the line break. “Living in the earth-deposits of our history”: that tells you that we’re going to read a poem about the past. It tells you [about] archeological ways of thinking about history: where it creeps, you get one layer and then another layer and then another layer that are going to be important to Rich rather than, say, truly narrative ways in which an action causes another action. And rather than single, discreet symbols that don’t change or open up. And tells you that we’re going to do some digging and we’re going to read a poem that operates archeologically, that asks how we got to this point, by digging into the past. It suggests that the poem is going to get our hands dirty, as it were, and it suggests [this] with that preposition “in.” Normally you’d say we’re living on the “earth-deposits.” If you live in Rome, you are living perhaps amid history and you are walking around on top of many layers of civilization but you’re not living inside them unless, you know, the ground opens up. Rich suggests almost that we’ve fallen into our history and we can’t get out. Joanne: You know, as I hear you talking about that first line, I can’t help but think about something you mention in your book. Which gets me to the second stanza as well, which is this notion that a poem does many things for many readers. Like the best poems, the ones that really stand the test of time, they’re capable of not only speaking to their particular moment or material conditions, but are able to speak beyond. And I hear you suggesting that in your reading of the first line, and then if you look at the second stanza, I couldn’t help but read it, not only in the moment that Adrienne Rich is writing, not only in the moment that she’s remembering Marie Curie, but when we read it in 2021, it has a different kind of resonance, right? “Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth / one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old / cure for fever or melancholy a tonic / for living on this earth in the winters of this climate.” What’s beautiful about that phrase “this climate” is that the “this climate” can change depending on who you are and when you read the poem and to imagine a hundred-year-old cure for the fever when reading it in a pandemic is kind of interesting to me, I don’t know if you felt that as you were writing about it or as you read it now, or… Stephanie: It’s very transferable and it’s a poem that’s about it’s own transferability. A poem that suggests that works of art and short poems like this one might be buried and then divulged or dug up or revealed by literal archeology or by other people investigating the past. And of course that literally happens, not just to American artifacts that are lost a hundred or two hundred years ago, but to artifacts and poems from millennia ago and digs elsewhere.She was not publicly an advocate for people with disabilities or for people with chronic illness, but she very much had those things. She was in at least intermittent serious pain from rheumatoid arthritis almost throughout her adult life, she walked with a cane, there were letters in the biography where her friends and her then husband would go on marches and she says “I wish you well, I’m 100% behind you in spirit, but I can’t physically march because I can’t stand up for that long.” Abram: Mmhmm. Stephanie: This is a poem that is about living with disabilities as well as a poem about gender. And a poem about looking at the past and a poem about being famous and being a great writer. It is extremely self-conscious about the balance that it displays for living on the surf and for writing poems like this one. Joanne: Yeah, I was just going to ask you about what you said about disability. Those middle two stanzas are really powerful because of what you’re saying as you’re reading them. If I could, I’ll just read them once again so our listeners can hear them, “today I was reading about Marie Curie: / she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness / her body bombarded for years by the element / she had purified / It seems she denied to the end / the source of the cataracts on her eyes / the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends / till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil.” Those are such visceral image-driven lines. There were two things I wanted to ask you about, two little phrases: “she must have known she suffered,” “it seems she denied to the end.” I’m curious about how she’s setting up the suffering of Marie Curie and what you think of how she describes it? Stephanie: She is setting up the radiation sickness that killed Marie Curie as a symbol that resonates in many, many ways. She is setting it up as a version of patriarchy. An unacknowledged or under-knowledged pervasive illness that has been advanced, to some extent by industrial civilization and that kills people and hurts people all the time, especially women but not only women. Marie Curie’s wounds came from the same sources of power literally because she achieved intellectual and social power by studying the radiation that killed her. If the radiation is patriarchy, then writers like Rich and many others are wounded by the same thing that we write about, right? We get power, we get the power to write books like Diving into the Wreck from the things that hurt us. And her wounds came from the same source as her power, but comes from that point of view, an inspiring slogan that has often been used in a context of feminism and gender-related liberation to give you the knowledge to see that the thing that hurts you can give you strength, right? And that’s not wrong, that’s right there in the poem. However, it’s not just a poem about how Curie’s wounds came from the same source as her power, it’s also a poem about her denial. Abram: Just to [pay attention to] a few of the words that draw out what you’re saying, first of all, just to note that denial happens three times in this poem, “denied,” “denying,” and “denying… “ Stephanie: And I know where you’re going with that! Abram: Yeah, so there’s a famous story of Peter, right, denying Christ three times. Stephanie: There’s also a famous poem by Elizabeth Bishop called “Roosters” that uses the story of Peter and Bishop says “deny, deny, deny, it’s not all the rooster’s cry.” And Rich knew Bishop very well, [I believe] the same year she’s working on this poem she might have already begun to write to Bishop. Abram: I’m super interested in this word “divulged,” that happens in the second stanza, so one way to read this poem is that you have four sort of almost disconnected stanzas that connect. Stephanie: Yeah. Abram: And one of the things you talk about in your book is the way difficulty can draw you into a poem. And one of the difficulties of this poem is figuring out how the whole thing hangs together. You’ve got one line in the beginning, “living in the earth-deposits of our history,” then the next stanza begins with “today,” and it’s about a backhoe pulling out a bottle of amber, and then suddenly we’re talking about Marie Curie in the third stanza and the fourth stanza. But this word “divulged,” the “backhoe divulged,” when you divulge something it’s sort of like you tell a secret. It’s sort of the opposite of denying something, divulging something. Stephanie: Yes! Abram: And yet where the poem goes after that is into denial. So I’m wondering if you could think about and talk about the first part of this poem, which is about this backhoe and this heap of things. And the second part of this poem which is about Marie Curie and how she denied the very thing that gave her strength was wounding her. Stephanie: Yeah. Well, Rich is writing and is often writing against denial (that’s what the poem “Diving into the Wreck” was about). Rich often thought of herself in the ‘70s too as someone who was making a difficult journey downward or a dangerous journey downward or a dramatic journey downward, as the steam shovel makes, to uncover secrets, to bring things to light. And Rich is bringing to light as a biographer or a history of science essay or whatever she was reading would bring to light. The secret connection or the unacknowledged connection between Curie’s science and her suffering. It probably wouldn’t have been a secret by the ‘70s, we know what radiation sickness looks like. But Rich is doing the divulging and denial is what poetry should not do for Rich. And divulging is one of the things that Rich’s kind of poems do. Divulging is also something that confessional poetry does, poetry that is focused primarily on the shame or the suffering of the actual poet who wrote it. And that was the kind of poetry that Rich could have written and chose not to write. Joanne: When I hear your insight about this poem, two things really keep rising up. The first is that this is a brilliant, magnificent poem, it is in no way a failure, but the poem is concerned with how poems can fail. Right? And that’s something we’ve discussed multiple times in this podcast. I feel like the best poems point to the fact that they may, very likely, fail. And there’s something you write in your book, it was very memorable when I came across this phrase, “poems embody problems we have not yet solved.” That might sound counterintuitive when you first read it because you think “well, shouldn’t the poet be the one who’s the seer, the maker, the one with the insight.” But maybe the insight is precisely that: that we can embody and grapple with and negotiate these problems and maybe not have a solution, but maybe just acknowledging that is a kind of solace or tonic, right? Abram: It is a divulgence of a problem that is at the same time denied, and that leads us to this final stanza that then frames it for us, gives us a kind of perception of the relationship between vulnerability and power, wounds, and the things that give us strength. And so we have these last four incredible lines: “she died a famous woman denying / her wounds / denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power.” And she’s doing so much in those lines but partly what she’s doing and part of the power of those lines is actually how they’re shaped and framed. So “She died a famous woman denying” that’s one line, “her wounds” is the next line, “denying” is the next line, “ and then “her wounds came from the same source as her power.” When you move into that last stanza, what comes to mind to you for how she’s working out her poem in those four lines? Stephanie: Partly it’s a decision you make in performance, if you’re reading it aloud there’s a lot of things you can do with that repetition. She’s got some great partial syntax going on there. Is she denying that the wounds exist? Well maybe for a while, but then when the phrase is repeated and filled out, even when she couldn’t deny that she was wounded, she was denying the source of her wounds. Abram: Yeah. And so moveable as you mentioned before, we all have our own wounds, right, we all have our own sort of tonics from history that we turn to. We all sort of live in our own sort of winters and climates. And so again, as you say, the symbols of these poems are so moveable from person to person and that’s part of the power of the poem itself, is that it draws you into an examination in a certain sense, of your own self and your own history and your own wounds, and your own sources of power. At the same time as it says with a sense of self-reproach, be wary, be careful. Take a closer look. Can you read the poem one more time for us? Stephanie: “Power” by Adrienne Rich Abram: Thank you! Thank you for reading that. You can learn more about Adrienne Rich and Stephanie Burt’s book Don’t Read Poetry on the Poetry for All website at poetryforall.fireside.fm Joanne: And please remember to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Abram: Thank you for listening!