Poetry: Adrienne Rich's "Wait" and "Tonight No Poetry Will Serve"

Adrienne Rich was a feminist and a poet who was born in Baltimore in 1929. She died on March 27,2012. W.S. Merwin described Rich as follows: "All her life she has been in love with the hope of telling utter truth, and her command of language from the first has been startlingly powerful." Her poetic career began with two collections that were praised for their fairy tale-like quality. In 1974 she was awarded the National Book Award for Diving into the Wreck. It was in 1973 in the midst of the feminist and civil rights movements, the Vietnam War, and her own personal distress that Rich wrote Diving into the Wreck. The collection was exploratory and contained angry poems. The fairy tale princess aspects had vanished. Rich accepted the award on behalf of all women and shared it with her fellow nominees, Alice Walker and Audre Lorde.

Rich over the course of her life received the Bollingen Prize, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the National Book Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. She was also a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Outspoken and thoughtful in her politics in 1997, she refused the National Medal of Arts. She has been quoted as saying to explain her refusal, "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration." She further offered, "[Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage." The same year, Rich was awarded the Academy's Wallace Stevens Award for outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. She was a powerhouse wordsmith with heroic convictions.

Wait
BY ADRIENNE RICH

In paradise every
the desert wind is rising
third thought
in hell there are no thoughts
is of earth
sand screams against your government
issued tent hell’s noise
in your nostrils crawl
into your ear-shell
wrap yourself in no-thought
wait no place for the little lyric
wedding-ring glint the reason why
on earth
they never told you


Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
by Adrienne Rich

Saw you walking barefoot
taking a long look
at the new moon's eyelid

later spread
sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair
asleep but not oblivious
of the unslept unsleeping
elsewhere

Tonight I think
no poetry
will serve

Syntax of rendition:

verb pilots the plane
adverb modifies action

verb force-feeds noun
submerges the subject
noun is choking
verb disgraced goes on doing

now diagram the sentence