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    Sinister Wisdom 87: Tribute to Adrienne Rich
    Sinister Wisdom 87: Tribute to Adrienne Rich
    Sinister Wisdom 87: Tribute to Adrienne Rich
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    Sinister Wisdom 87: Tribute to Adrienne Rich

    By Sinister Wisdom

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    About this ebook

    Tribute to Adrienne Rich. Featuring work by Cheryl Clarke, Rachel Tzvia Back, Elliott batTzedek, Elana Dykewomon, Stephania Byrd, Jocelyn Heath, Jewelle Gomez, Antonia Matthew, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Lynda Koolish, Jenny Factor, Chris Shorne, Bekah Steimel, and Alison Bechdel. Obituary for Leigh Star and more!

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSinister Wisdom
    Release dateMar 22, 2019
    ISBN9781944981280
    Sinister Wisdom 87: Tribute to Adrienne Rich
    Author

    Sinister Wisdom

    Sinister Wisdom is a multicultural lesbian literary & art journal that publishes four issues each year. Publishing since 1976, Sinister Wisdom works to create a multicultural, multi-class lesbian space. Sinister Wisdom seeks to open, consider and advance the exploration of lesbian community issues. Sinister Wisdom recognizes the power of language to reflect our diverse experiences and to enhance our ability to develop critical judgment as lesbians evaluating our community and our world.

    Read more from Sinister Wisdom

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      Book preview

      Sinister Wisdom 87 - Sinister Wisdom

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      TABLE OF CONTENTS

      Notes for a Magazine

      Merry Gangemi

      Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012: A Reflective Obituary

      Cheryl Clarke

      Rich Recollections: ‘her love means danger’

      Rachel Tzvia Back

      The Choice of Love: A Reflection on Adrienne Rich

      Elliott batTzedek

      March 28, 2012: Adrienne and Earl

      Elana Dykewomon

      A Dream of Uncommon Legacies

      Stephania Byrd

      Bopping and Dipping on a Half Step

      Jocelyn Heath

      The Fern and The Tree: A Tribute to Adrienne Rich

      Jewelle Gomez

      What is Found There?

      Antonia Matthew

      March 27th, 2012

      Alexis Pauline Gumbs

      Communiqué to White Ally Heaven

      Lynda Koolish

      Artist Statement

      Adrienne Rich

      Audre Lorde

      Pat Parker

      Cheryl Clarke

      Chrystos

      June Jordan

      Dawn McGuire

      Elsa Gidlow

      Jewelle Gomez

      Joy Harjo

      Susan Griffin

      Judy Grahn

      Jenny Factor

      That gift. This burning.

      The Middle Distances

      Chris Shorne

      Lesbian Woman Murdered in Home

      Divination

      Of Complications Due to Stomach Stapling

      Freud the Baptist

      Julie R. Enszer

      Adrienne Rich and Michelle Cliff Editing Sinister Wisdom: ‘A resource for women of conscience’

      Bekah Steimel

      stuck in a web

      Alison Bechdel

      Excerpt from The Essential Dykes

      R. Ruth Linden

      Remembering Leigh Star

      Book Reviews

      Call for Submissions

      Advertisements

      Sinister Wisdom Fall Fundraising Campaign Acknowledgements

      Notes for a Magazine

      In retrospectives on Rich since her death, much has been written about her poetry and her prose and the profound impact Rich had on individual women as well as her influence on the broader women’s movement. In addition, Rich was extraordinarily influential as an editor. Her editorial marks on Sinister Wisdom is a testament to the commitment of Rich and Cliff to lesbian-feminism and the material realities that make writers’ lives possible.

      As an editor, Rich was both generous and fair-mindedly critical. Rich’s stature as a poet and leading lesbian-feminist thinker added to the prestige of Sinister Wisdom. As I have research lesbian-feminist print culture in the 1970s and 1980s, one experience that many writers talk about is having work rejected—or accepted—by Sinister Wisdom during the Rich/Cliff editorship. Alison Bechdel writes about it in her most recent memoir, Are You My Mother?; she also wrote about it in her introduction to The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For. Many other lesbian writers have mentioned their fabled letters from Adrienne Rich and Michelle Cliff regarding submission to Sinister Wisdom.

      In this issue of Sinister Wisdom, a diverse array of writers recall the life and legacy of Adrienne Rich and what Rich means to them. In pieces that are both personal and political, lesbians bring texture and new meanings to Rich and her lifetime of work. Adrienne Rich had a vital role in Sinister Wisdom and we—Merry Gangemi and I as editors, the members of the Board of Directors, and our community of readers—mourn her passing. Through the grief, we assemble this issue to appreciate her legacy as a poet, scholar, essayist, thinker, intellectual, and editor.

      This issue also marks the 87th issue of Sinister Wisdom and the success of our fall fundraising campaign. As co-editors, Merry Gangemi and I work for Sinister Wisdom for free. We love Sinister Wisdom—and we believe in building and promoting lesbian literature and culture. So does our entire board of directors, which you will see on the masthead has grown recently; we are pleased to welcome Sharon Bridgforth, Sue Lenaerts, and Samn Stockwell to the board of directors. Although we all work for free, the printer and the mail shop need to be paid with U.S. currency. Sinister Wisdom has a core of subscribers, but subscriber contributions do not cover the full expenses of producing three print issues of the journal each year. So we turn to the community to support Sinister Wisdom. Our community is extraordinarily generous. Over the next year, community contributions will help to:

      • Release this special issue dedicated to Adrienne Rich.

      • Produce three issues of Sinister Wisdom in 2013.

      • Release our very first "Sinister Wisdom Classic"—a reprint of a lesbian-feminist classic book to reach new audiences.

      • Give free subscriptions of Sinister Wisdom to women in prison, women with limited incomes, and women in mental institutions.

      We are grateful to all of the women who made generous contributes to Sinister Wisdom. They are acknowledged individually in the back of the journal.

      In our joy at recognizing new supporters of Sinister Wisdom and new board members, we want to share our deep appreciation for Rose Provenzano. Rose recently retired from the Sinister Wisdom Board of Directors. Rose was a tireless supporter of women’s publications, and Sinister Wisdom in particular. Her life partner, Elena Boyd, passed away in 2006. Both Rose and Elena were activists in the lesbian and feminist communities. Thank you, Rose, for your commitment to Sinister Wisdom!

      This issue of Sinister Wisdom is dedicated to the life and work of Adrienne Rich. Her memory is a blessing.

      Julie R. Enszer

      November 2012

      Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012: A Reflective Obituary

      Merry Gangemi

      The typical mainstream obituary identifies Rich as a quintessential, albeit token, lesbian-feminist. In the years since her first publishing successes, Rich’s intelligence, accomplishments, and presence within second-wave American feminism commanded attention from the general leadership of the male-dominated American literary scene. W.H. Auden famously wrote that in selecting A Change of World (1951) for The Yale Younger Poets prize, he selected poems that "are neatly and modestly dressed, speak quietly but do not mumble, respect their elders but are not cowed by them, and do not tell fibs.¹" As Rich would later explain, this patronizing recognition gave her impetus to break free of formalist modes and develop her voice and style in later work.

      Rich was an American who never took her eyes off the realities of America. In the foreword of Arts of the Possible (2001), Rich says, I began as an American optimist, albeit a critical one, formed by our racial legacy and by the Vietnam War…. I became an American skeptic, not as to the long search for justice and dignity…but in light of my nation’s role in demoralizing and destabilizing that search.²

      From early on, Rich was all about curiosity, examination, dialogue, and change. She was also about courage and foresight:

      I have been standing all my life in the

      direct path of a battery of signals

      the most accurately transmitted most

      untranslateable language in the universe

      I am a galactic cloud so deep so invo-

      luted that a light could take 15

      years to travel through me And has

      taken I am an instrument in the shape

      of a woman trying to translate pulsations

      into images for the relief of the body

      and the reconstruction of the mind.³

      Rich’s moral and intellectual integrity is what would translate insight and intuition into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind. Rich articulates this in another, more vulnerable way: In writing poetry, she notes in her foreword to The Fact of a Doorframe (1974), I have known both keen happiness and the worst fear—that the walls cannot be broken down, that these words will fail to enter another soul (xv). Or as Cheryl Clarke so vividly conjures in Rich Recollections: ‘her love means danger’: In the end no plea no bargain: ‘it’s your own humanity you’ll have to drag/ over and over, piece by piece/ page after page….

      Adrienne Cecile Rich was a woman of the American South. Born in Baltimore, Maryland on May 16, 1929, she was fortunate in birth and gifted with intelligence and curiosity. Her parents, Helen and Arnold Rich, were highly educated and accomplished; her father was a professor and pathologist at Johns Hopkins Medical School and her mother a composer and concert pianist—but one who sacrificed her career to marriage and motherhood. As Rich writes in the poem, From an Old House in America:

      I am an American woman:

      I turn that over

      like a leaf pressed in a book

      I stop and look up from

      into the coals of the stove

      or the black square of the window⁴

      The poem speaks to the depth of Rich’s empathy and understanding of difference and inequality—of the American landscape and her own place in it, her location behind the black square of the window:

      Rich’s capacity to apprehend and understand this place—and geography—is rooted in her willingness to examine her personal past within historical context; to ask questions and to change. If you had known me/ once, you’d still know me now though in a different/ light and life.⁵ Change is what continually expanded her awareness of others—similar to her or not—and identified family as both intimate and peripheral relationships. We can see this is the sheer vastness of the family that mourns Rich, and the ways she made everyone feel special and important—personally and collectively. A Change of World, The Will to Change, The Dream of a Common Language, A Wild Patience has Taken Me this Far—all call for change.

      Adrienne Rich was born into an America teetering on the brink of The Great Depression but her father’s house

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