My complicated mourning: RIP, Adrienne Rich
29 Thursday Mar 2012
Posted by rafeposey
http://rafeposey.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/my-complicated-mourning-rip-adrienne-rich/I fell in love with Adrienne Rich and her poetry in the late 1980s, when I got my first job at a bookstore. I was 17, and Tim, the bookstore's manager, put me in charge of the poetry section. Up until then, most of what I knew about poetry was stuff I had learned almost by accident on the rare occasions that I actually went to my lit classes, or what my girlfriend, who was good at school, read to me. Working the poetry section changed that by degrees – there was an awful lot of stuff I didn't like (Rod McKuen, anyone?), but there were also books by Nikki Giovanni and Adrienne Rich, and they moved on me in deep and mysterious ways. Diving into the Wreck was one of the first books of poetry I ever bought, and when Blood, Bread, and Poetry came out that year, I bought it joyously. I had imprinted on her poetry, and now I could read her prose as well. I swallowed every word.
At the same time, I was exploring my own identity first as a young lesbian, and then as a young queer person with gender troubles. This was during the AIDS years, and I chose the label "queer" deliberately, as a signal against the homophobia that I encountered daily. Adrienne Rich taught me about my literary heritage as a woman who wrote (yes, I'm trans, so I guess technically I was a man, but I lived as a woman for most of this time, so...). She taught me how to confront and explore racism and heterosexism. She taught me how to find poetry in daily life, in tragedy, and in community. For all of this, I remain profoundly grateful.
