Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
BY Adrienne Rich
(W.W. Norton, 2011)

Rich’s twenty-fifth book of poetry opens with the gorgeous musicality that has come to be one of the signature aspects of her work. “Waiting for Rain, for Music” begins:

Rich’s poems are works of oratory as well as works of art, and her technical mastery of language is where the two faces of her craft come together in seamless pieces of prosody. Here, her choices in caesuras, stanza breaks, and line breaks work together to control the pacing and tenor of the poem. Rich’s poems are works of oratory as well as works of art, and her technical mastery of language is where the two faces of her craft come together in seamless pieces of prosody. Had she chosen to place each grouping of words on their own lines, this poem would read too slowly to connote urgency. Had she chosen to create the caesuras with periods rather than extra spacing, the tempo would read too quickly for the poem’s full meaning to unfold — and no accomplished orator would ever race through a speech. This poem, as with most all of the poems Rich has written over the course of her sixty-year career, has weighty social and political import: she knows exactly how to make the most of the genre to appeal both to the humanitarian consciousness and musical ear of all readers, and this combination results in eloquent and powerful poetry.

What makes Rich’s poems matter is that the speakers are not distant voices calling for change. On the contrary, they always have a stake in the issue at hand. Empathy is the hallmark of the work that has made her voice such an enduring one in the last half-century of social change. Indeed, many poems in Tonight No Poetry Will Serve are spoken by a voice deeply empathetic to victims of oppression. For example, “From Sickbed Shores” opens with this global perspective:

The wavelengths of all oppressed peoples’ voices reach into us through Rich’s technically sophisticated shape of line: the first line of the poem stretches as far as it physically can across the page; then makes an enjambed snap back to “snakes,” a dramatically short line; then stretches into another long line which ends with an expectant transitive verb. It is only the third line of the poem, and we are already hooked. Several stanzas later, we see that the “sick body” of the planet, with its stretched skin and “exhausted ear” is one in the same as the bound and tortured body of each prisoner:

The speaker here has no ego boundaries which separate “me” from “us” from “them,” fortifying her empathetic voice with sincerity. As the poem goes on, the speaker continues to address the you “who haven’t yet put in a word,” which leads the readers to reflect on whether they have themselves spoken out against oppression, or whether theirs is the “body sheathed in indifference” (p. 37). “From Sickbed Shores” is a strong call for each one of us to feel the plight of the oppressed and speak out against their victimization.

Rich presents a full spectrum of oppressive social and political forces throughout the book, a collective list which crystallizes in the poem “Ballade of the Poverties.” The visually specific images of poverty in its many forms are what anchor the impact of the poem. It begins

Each and every poverty named in the two-page poem is described with a single heartbreaking and/or stomach-turning image. Rich compounds the emotional difficulty of these lines with the literal difficulty of reading them: the awkward syntax of lines such as “The poverty of to steal” or “The poverty of to mouth” makes the reader stumble, and this stumbling is emphasized by the interspersal of smooth lyrical lines such as “Princes of predation let me tell you / There are poverties and there are poverties.” As she does in “From Sickbed Shores,” Rich is bringing the reader face-to-face with desperate social and political problems currently in need of people who will dedicate themselves to finding solutions. Her poems give us no room to turn away, and this is precisely the point, because the fact of the matter is that too many people generally do.

“Scenes of Negotiation” is a poem that figures protesters who do dedicate themselves to the fight against oppression, and are imprisoned for it:

The “you” whose activism is collectively questioned in “From Sickbed Shores” are here the imprisoned protesters whom the speaker identifies as “what or who you chose or became.” The question of choice in identity is one which has fascinated Rich for many years. People oppressed due to issues such as gender, race, poverty, or politics do not have a full range of choices regarding their identity, and there are extenuating factors that narrow the identity choices many non-oppressed people have. How do we choose our identity? Speakers in Rich poems preceding Tonight No Poetry Will Serve annunciate this lack of choice: the speaker of “The Roofwalker” (in Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law) says “A life I didn’t choose / chose me.” The speaker of “From an Old House in America” (in Poems: Selected and New) says “I never chose this place / yet am now of it.” And, most poignantly, the speaker of “Waking in the Dark” (in Diving into the Wreck) says:

Similarly, Axel Avákar, “fictive poet, counter-muse, brother,” as Rich explains the character to whom she addresses all the poems in the fourth section of the book, is not able to chose who he is or what he does. In “Axel, in thunder,” while everyone else in the scene has taken refuge from the storm, Axel is, by no will of his own, utterly exposed to it:

Axel is only fictional, of course, having been dreamed up by Rich, but he represents, among other things, the untold numbers of real men and women who are not at liberty to shape their own identity. The poem that follows this one, by contrast, offers the hope of choosing who one is and what one does, as this is precisely what the speaker herself does. I will quote “I was there, Axel” in full, to convey its full meaning:

The speaker tells of a woman who endured suffering to claim her own voice, and, having done so, now works to dredge up the lost voices of others. The woman’s journey is a long one, and still not over, as evidenced by one of her arms being bound behind her, and so her suffering continues in her effort to free it. The speaker makes a strong claim of her own action and identity here, which the clipped lines and elliptical syntax promote: “and my decision was” at first reads as if it refers to her decision of “working alongside” the woman in the boat. Continuing on, it reads as if referring to her decision “to be in no other way / a woman.” Grammatically and semantically, the “decision” refers to both what she is doing and who she is: a woman helping another women to lift voices up out of the silence imposed upon them “from far below and long ago.” This is what Adrienne Rich has always done through her writing. This is the woman she has chosen to become, and her latest book of poetry is yet another testament to the unparalleled power she finds in empathy, womanhood, and words.