ELIOT KATZ
REACHING OUT TO ADRIENNE RICH: AN ACTIVIST POET’S TRIBUTE
Dear Rosa Luxemburg,
It has been too long since I wrote you last, and
now I am sorry to have to relay the sad news of the death of one of our
greatest U.S. poets carrying your torch for freedom and egalitarian democracy.
It was in the late 1980s or early 1990s that I began occasionally reaching out
to Adrienne in personal correspondence, sending her a few poems that I hoped
she might like, asking some questions about poetry and politics, and letting
her know about some activist projects that I was involved in. At the time, I
was working for Middlesex Interfaith Partners with the Homeless in Central New
Jersey, with one of Adrienne’s former poetry students; and was also organizing
with a new national student activist group, Student Action Union. Adrienne
answered my initial letters with a few kind notes about my poems, and with best
wishes on our activist projects.
By then, Rosa, I knew that Adrienne, one of the
few U.S. poets to have really played a springboard role in our era’s major
progressive movements, was becoming deeply influenced by your writings—by your
unwavering commitment to a more just and compassionate political and economic
climate, and by your civil-liberties-loving insistence that “freedom is always
and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently.” After the Cold
War’s end, with America’s mainstream press and politicians taking the pulse of
world history and declaring socialism dead, Adrienne had written that she felt
it was a good time to go back and read some of the earlier socialist thinkers,
to see how those promising seeds, urging more democratic decision-making from
the halls of government to the sweatshop streets, had been betrayed both from
within and without.
In one of my early letters to Adrienne, I
mentioned that I was a former student and good friend of Stephen Bronner, who had written Socialism Unbound, and
edited a terrific English translation of your letters. In her book, What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and
Politics, Adrienne wrote: “I would find the words in Rosa Luxemburg….This was powerfully akin to the experience of writing
poetry. Politics as an expression of … what’s ‘humanly possible.’ ”
Throughout her literary life, Adrienne was always pushing to expand the
boundaries of what might be considered humanly possible, knowing as William
Blake knew, that what can be imagined can be made real, that more tasty
democratic stews could be cooked with the right inventive mix of subjective and
communal ingredients. Rosa, the admiration we shared for your democratic-left
ideas helped cement a literary friendship for the next two decades, during
which Adrienne was consistently generous in answering letters and in donating
poems to anthologies and journals I was helping to edit–Changing America: Contemporary U.S. Poems of Protest, published
bilingually in France, Logos: A Journal
of Modern Society and Culture published online, the “Beat Bush” issue of Long
Shot literary magazine. We forwarded emails to each other with petitions to
end the wars in Iraq, for civil and human rights, and to end the mutually
disastrous Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. And, in recent years,
she sent kind personal emails that lifted my spirits during difficult health
struggles.
In your tradition, Rosa, Adrienne knew that
freedom for all is inextricably linked with freedom for each, that each
individual’s thoughts are inevitably shaped in part by wider social winds, that
the bicycle ride for free expression and the roaring train motoring to end
world-hunger are different vehicles traveling along the same utopian trail,
that a healthy society could never come into being through the dictatorial
declarations of bureaucrats pretending to be doctors sitting behind sterile
desks, that a cutting-edge critique of current events is raised in its
intergalactic worth when it is connected to the loftiest of emancipatory
dreams. Adrienne called “What if?”: “the first revolutionary question, the
question the dying forces don’t know how to ask.” She knew that building a new
world from the moldy crust of the old would require fresh ways of putting
language together, and she challenged herself to devise new poetic forms and
devices with the same boiling urgency that she used to confront the icy status
quo. She knew that old myths were in need of both deconstruction and
reconstruction, and that “beauty that won’t deny, is itself an eye.” Adrienne
found hope in poetry’s gift for breaking stainless-steel silences, and in the
breathtaking array of roles that poetry could play in supporting social
movements, even as she did not view art as a substitute for making political
change. In “Dreamwood,” a poem whose title was meant to help connect the
floorboard material world with the transformative power of imagination, she wrote that “poetry isn’t revolution but a way of knowing why
it must come.” In memorable poems like “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” and
“Twenty-One Love Poems,” she developed multi-verse forms, like a quantum
physicist playing around with the ten dimensions of space, capable of
converting separated fragments into sustainable communities. And in “Atlas of
the Difficult World,” she mapped out our country’s problems of far too much
racism, sexism, nationalism, and war; too many apathetic suburbs and foreclosed
farms; ecological nightmares threatening our thunderous days; city
infrastructures homeless and crumbling, stampeding, unchecked power and
powerlessness; too many politicians “trying to revive dead statues to lead us,”
too many kids dripping uninsured blood and hope. Addressing these third-rail
tribulations, Adrienne insisted: “A patriot is not a weapon. A patriot is one
who wrestles for the soul of her country.”
Rosa, I can’t remember whether, the last time I
wrote you, I mentioned my own wrestling these past few years with chronic Lyme
disease, which can be far more difficult to diagnose and treat, and far more
debilitating, than most people realize if it isn’t caught early because one
doesn’t see a tick or bulls-eye rash. As someone who well understood my
struggles from her own experiences, Adrienne’s best-wishes emails never failed
to deliver coast-to-coast shots of clean energy directly to the spine. I had
met Adrienne in person in the 1990s, during several New York-area poetry
readings, and she was then walking frailly, with a wooden rheumatoid-arthritis
cane. At the time, I couldn’t remember reading about her having had a long-term
illness and assumed that RA had struck her in recent years. It was only in late
2011, during our email discussions about the growing and inspiring Occupy Wall
Street movement–including its poetry collective with which I was working–that I
learned she had been dealing with rheumatoid arthritis ever since her twenties.
As someone who, in illness, has found it impossible to keep up with anywhere
near my old poetic production, I was astonished to realize that Adrienne’s
incredible literary and activist legacy had been accomplished under such trying
circumstances. No wonder she could so brilliantly map out the social challenges
of our time—she had overcome her own challenges daily for five decades plus!
In a 2007 essay, “Poetry and Commitment,”
Adrienne had written: “poetry has the capacity…to remind us of something we are
forbidden to see. A forgotten future, a still uncreated site whose moral
architecture rests not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women,
torture and bribes, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of
freedom.” We remember writers who have influenced our lives and world-views in
different ways. Walt Whitman famously told poets to come that we would be able
to find him, simply by looking at the grass under our boot-soles. Allen
Ginsberg once told me that, while he was editing a new poem, he would picture friends
and influences, living and dead, with their eyes looking over his shoulder,
helping him to see first-draft lines in new ways; so that I’ll forever picture
Allen as one of those influential sets of editing eyes looking over my
shoulder. With Adrienne, I will remember what she wrote about one of her own
poetry influences, Muriel Rukeyser— “we reach her by recognizing our need for
her, by going to libraries and taking out volume after volume, by going,
finally, to the crossroads—of poetry, politics, science, sexuality—and meeting
her there, where she waits, reaching for us”—and I will see Adrienne, reaching
out, with visionary arms that proved strong enough to overcome autoimmune
arthritis for over fifty years, now in death, still with her unique generosity,
helping to coax and carry us, from a mixed earthly present filled with too much
danger and decay, to a more humane future whose light-gray outlines are only
barely visible today.
With love, best wishes, and a promise, Rosa, to
try to write next time, without waiting so long, and with better news about the
ever-changing shape of our planet,
April 2012
[Originally
published at Logos: a journal of modern society &
culture, Vol.11, Issues 2-3, at
http://logosjournal.com/2012/spring-summer_katz/. Used by permission of the
author.]