Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations [Paperback]

Adrienne Rich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 17, 2002

"Adrienne Rich's new prose collection could have been titled The Essential Rich."—Women's Review of Books

These essays trace a distinguished writer's engagement with her time, her arguments with herself and others. "I am a poet who knows the social power of poetry, a United States citizen who knows herself irrevocably tangled in her society's hopes, arrogance, and despair," Adrienne Rich writes. The essays in Arts of the Possible search for possibilities beyond a compromised, degraded system, seeking to imagine something else. They call on the fluidity of the imagination, from poetic vision to social justice, from the badlands of political demoralization to an art that might wound, that may open scars when engaged in its work, but will finally suture and not tear apart. This volume collects Rich's essays from the last decade of the twentieth century, including four earlier essays, as well as several conversations that go further than the usual interview. Also included is her essay explaining her reasons for declining the National Medal for the Arts. "The work is inspired and inspiring."—Alicia Ostriker "[S]o clear and clean and thorough. I learn from her again and again."—Grace Paley

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Rich's engaging new collection of essays reaffirms what Norton editors declared some 25 years ago: the "private poet" has gone public, "without sacrificing the complexity of subjective experience or the intensity of personal emotion." This certainly holds true for Rich the essayist as well, for she has firmly established herself as a major American poet and intellectual most concerned with the intersection of the public and private, the social and personal. The overarching goal of her intellectual project is to discover what's imaginatively possible in a cultural system debased by economic, social and political injustice, which, she suggests, are perhaps inherent in capitalism. While her powerful and frequently anthologized essay on "compulsory heterosexuality" is not included, the equally famous and influential "`When We Dead Awaken': Writing as Re-Vision" leads off the collection. This 1971 feminist tract brilliantly strategizes how women can re-examine literature and culture in order to resist patriarchal hegemony and give voice to their own experience. Other notable entries include "Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet," which posits that "political struggle and spiritual continuity are meshed"; the title essay, a consideration of, among other issues, identity politics; and the spirited 1997 essay-letter that explains why she declined the National Medal for the Arts. As Rich herself acknowledges in the foreword, a few of the essays "may seem to belong to a bygone era." They provide, however, a prism through which to view Rich's thinking over the years, and they neatly demonstrate the transformations in her views over time. While the essays, "notes" and "conversations" may be read individually, what's perhaps most fascinating and rewarding about this collection is charting Rich's intellectual journey itself.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

The author of more than 16 volumes of poetry, plus four of prose, and winner of many awards, including a MacArthur and a Lannan, Rich needs no introduction. This prose collection begins with four "background" essays, first published in the 1970s and 1980s. The rest proceed more or less chronologically, tracing the poet's thinking about her art and her time and culminating in the fine title essay (which may have been the impetus behind the book). Rich here characterizes herself as a poet of the "oppositional imagination, meaning that I don't think my only argument is with myself." She has always been concerned with issues larger than the personal, though labels such as lesbian, feminist, and Marxist do as much to obscure as to illuminate the poet's points. She wants us to look at our lives and capitalist society and ask anew the kinds of questions Marx asked. As she inquires in the title essay, "What about the hunger no commodity can satisfy because it is not a hunger for something on a shelf?" Recommended for academic and public libraries. Mary Paumier Jones, Westminster P.L., CO
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 190 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (May 17, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393323129
• ISBN-13: 978-0393323122
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #135,332 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #78 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Women's Studies > Women Writers

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rich is a national treasure, January 13, 2002

By 

David Allen "Dave Allen" (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (Hardcover)

Please ignore the review above. It's author seems to have missed thepoint entirely. This book is essential reading, as all of Rich's books are. One of our greatest writers.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Delicately created and stimulating, March 12, 2006

By 

Kilgore Trout - See all my reviews

This review is from: Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (Paperback)

If you have ever thought about the relationship between art and politics, or art and social justice, Adrienne Rich's collection of essays and conversations is a must read.

In "When We Dead Awaken" (Chapt 1) - Interweaving prose and poetry, Rich demonstrates how she slowly came to terms with her identity as a female poet - a process she termed, "awakening of dead or sleeping consciousness." A process that would seem vital for any oppressed group, Rich explains how after years of sleepwalking, under the direction of men, women were slowly "awakening," re-visioning their past and drawing conclusions on the present.

The book alone is worth reading simply for the 3rd chapter, a philosophical and feminist perspective on lying. "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying" is a unique and compelling treatise on the causes and effects of lying.

5 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Feminism's bad name: Adrienne Rich, September 17, 2001

By 

Victoria Brockmeier "VB" (Buffalo, NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (Hardcover)

Every once in a while I wonder why, in this age, people still utter the word "feminist" as though it were an obscenity. Then I pick up one of Adrienne Rich's books, and I think, Oh yeah. That's why.

Arts of the Possible purports to be a text on aesthetics, but it winds up more of a text on Adrienne Rich. The "essays" include "Notes" for several talks she's given, and unlike most essays titled "Notes," these really are just her notes, without any effort to flesh them in; the full text of other speeches; some singularly unenlightening "conversations," where she displays her disheartening lack of an understanding of literature; and a few legitimate essays, most that have appeared in other anthologies. In fact, the title piece to her previous collected prose, Blood, Bread and Poetry, is here.

Her argumentative strategy mostly consists of rambling a bit about herself, especially the horrors of growing up in a house filled with books of poetry by white men, making some vague, unsupported, barely-arguable generalizations ("the reading of poetry in an elite academic institution is supposed to lead you. . . not toward a criticism of society, but toward a professional career in which the anatomy of poems is studied dispassionately"--since when?), drawing even more generalized conclusions, and then ranting about the wickedness of capitalism or patriarchy. Often, she takes swings at big-business publishing's utter lack of an aesthetic and slavery to the bottom line, claiming that the larger houses print nothing of worth. What press is this book on? Norton, a behemoth if there ever was one. What press put out her last couple collecteds? Norton. What press has she published just about every volume she's ever spewed out? Norton.

Intriguing.

Many pieces hint at the theory most expounded in "Defying the Space that Separates," the reprinted introduction from the abominable 1996 Best American Poetry: poor people make better art than rich people do. It's a peculiarly Protestant notion (peculiar especially because she makes so much of her oppressed and suppressed Jewish heritage). Sure, you're starving, your teeth are falling out because you can't get decent health care, and you had to sell your baby to an infertile couple from Napersville just to pay your back rent, but you do some really powerful paintings. Not only is this ludicrous on its face, but it's made especially so considering Rich's admitted upbringing in the upper-middle class, attendance at prestigious universities, and current residence in a posh San Francisco neighborhood. She has made quite a living on fashionable compassion for a class with which she's had precious little contact.

T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a host of miserable but financially-comfortable artists dating from the time of the Italian Rennaissance would definitely disagree with her theories, as would I. Having grown up in close contact with plenty of trailer parks and inner-city ghettos, I can guarantee that most the poor--like most the rest of America--are perfectly happy with their singing fish plaques and Jerry Springer Too Hot for TV videos. Many middle- to upper-class white Americans who feel guilty about their own privilege have proposed that disenfranchisement leads to better art. They haven't been right either.

I would put forth that this rhetoric is, in fact, dangerous to the underappreciated sects Rich claims to represent. Works like that 96 Best, which utterly sacrifice artistry and craft to present a political agenda undermine the very cause it purports to promote. If the poor, gays and lesbians, prison inmates, people of marginalized race groups, and the like are represented by bad work, the established hegemony will have every excuse to exclude them from the canon.

Rich's prose occasionally breaks into moments of genuine music, but for the most part it's painfully self-aggrandizing, and at times even offensively so. Arts of the Possible feels like nothing so much as a last-ditch effort by a woman who fears she'll be remembered as a radical instead of a writer, or worse, forgotten entirely.

Those of us who take both our politics and our art seriously can only hope that last will indeed come to pass, and that our work will be considered fairly, out of the ugly shadow writers like Rich currently cast on anyone whose muse has a political bent.