Poet's Choice

By Robert Pinsky
Sunday, September 30, 2007

Personal emotions -- impatience, affection, discomfort of illness, pleasure in food or music, feeling old or angry, sorrow and exhilaration -- are not necessarily diminished by political or social context. On the contrary, the context can make the feelings mean more. In a way, the word "personal" is what diminishes emotion, by bleaching away the social or political meanings of what we feel. That is why Adrienne Rich's poetry has enduring importance. Here is a poem from her new book:

ARCHAIC

Cold wit leaves me cold

this time of the world Multifoliate disorders

straiten my gait Minuets don't become me

Been wanting to get out see the sights

but the exits are slick with people

going somewhere fast

every one with a shared past

and a mot juste And me so out of step

with my late-night staircase inspirations my

utopian slant

Still, I'm alive here

in this village drawn in a tightening noose

of ramps and cloverleafs

but the old directions I drew up

for you

are obsolete

Here's how

to get to me

I wrote

Don't misconstrue the distance

take along something for the road

everything might be closed

this isn't a modern place

You arrived starving at midnight

I gave you warmed-up food

poured tumblers of brandy

put on Les Barricades Myst¿rieuses

-- the only jazz in the house

We talked for hours of barricades

lesser and greater sorrows

ended up laughing in the thicksilver

birdstruck light

There's a grown-up, wise charm in the comedy of the self here: "late-night staircase inspirations" are the equivalent of staircase wit: the what-I-shoulda-said that comes to one on the stairs after leaving the party. Those inspirations, like "my utopian slant," are not disavowed by the wry laughter. On the contrary, like the cranky dislike for the noose of the highway and the loyalty to the past -- "this isn't a modern place" -- Rich's loyalties and political passions take on conviction from her ability to place them in a particular life, at a specific time. The poem, addressed to a particular person, describing a splendid particular moment "in the thicksilver/birdstruck light" also suggests something more general: the poet's allegorical invitation to us readers, with directions for approaching the poet's work: "Here's how to get to me." It is part of the pleasure, and the point, that the directions change with time: like the poet, an alert reader adapts and takes fresh routes to the destination.

(Adrienne Rich's poem "Archaic" can be found in "Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth: Poems, 2004-2006." Norton. Copyright 2007 by Adrienne Rich.)