Nov 26, 2004  |  By: KATHI WOLFE  | COMMENTS     

AT THIS MOMENT in America, as the Iraq war drags on and same-sex marriage bans flourish across the country, nothing is more timely than renowned lesbian writer Adrienne Rich’s poetry.

Rich, who has written of love between women, war and peace, racism and homophobia in 16 volumes of poetry and five books of non-fiction, writes boldly in her latest book of poems of the uncomfortable truths about this country in the post 9/11 era in a time of war.

“Diarrhea first question of the day/children shivering it’s September/Second question: where is my mother?,” she writes in “The School Among the Ruins,” a poem set in a schoolroom under the siege of war.

“One: I don’t know where your mother/is Two: I don’t know/why they are trying to hurt us/Three: or the latitude and longitude/of their hatred,” the teacher says later in the poem, which is the title work of Rich’s new poetry collection “The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004.” (She wrote this poem as a member of Poets Against the War, a group opposed to the war in Iraq.)

Though Rich’s work movingly describes the despair and isolation that these truths engender, she has never wanted us to be stuck in our emotional pain. She writes to explore the dialectic between “the personal, or lyric voice, and the so-called political — really, the voice of the individual speaking out just to herself, or to a beloved friend, but to and from a collective, a social realm,” she says.

“Touch food to the lips/let taste never betray you/cinnamon vanilla melting/on apple tart/but what you really craved/a potency of words,” Rich writes in “For June, in the Year 2001,” an elegy for the late June Jordan, an African-American poet and writer who identified as bisexual. (Jordan succumbed to breast cancer two years ago.)

BORN IN 1929, RICH has been writing highly regarded poetry for more than 50 years.

At 21, her first book of poems, “A Change of World,” won the Yale Younger Poets award in 1951. Yet, Rich’s poems were criticized in male-dominated poetry circles when she began writing about women, sexuality, gender, civil rights and other political movements in the mid-1960s.

Since then her groundbreaking work, which addresses heterosexism and other subjects that were once taboo in poetry and prose, has inspired generation of lesbians, gay men and progressives. In her essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Rich writes of “the physical passion of woman for woman which is central to lesbian existence: the erotic sexuality which has been … the most violently erased fact of female experience.”

Yet women have resisted “compulsory heterosexuality,” Rich says, “at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism and extreme poverty.”

As with Rich’s previous work, the poems in “The School Among the Ruins” connect the personal with the political. There is the wonderful love poem “Memorize This” where she writes: “One loses an earring the other finds it/One says I’d rather make love/Then go to the Greek Festival/The other, I agree.”

Others are a searing denunciation of our culture in this time.

“The School Among the Ruins” is by turns witty, touching, engaging and a ringing call to political action. But sequences like the prose poems “Usonian Journals 2000,” which uses the techniques of film noir and complex language, can be a difficult read.

Despite the demands that Rich’s poetry makes, readers who care about language, love and resistance to war will want to read this book.

“Poetry is not a luxury,” she says.

This is true now more than ever.