May 16: Adrienne Rich

Poet and essayist Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore on this date in 1929. She completed her first book of poetry in her last year of college and began receiving what would be a slew of prominent achievement awards throughout her life. Rich married in 1953 and had three sons during that decade. The radical 1960s swept her up in civil rights, anti-war, and feminist activism, and her writing became a source of insight, challenge and inspiration for a generation in motion. Rich’s marriage dissolved in 1970 and she came out as a lesbian in the middle of the decade. As the winner of the 1974 National Book Award (for Diving into the Wreck), Rich was by then one of the most widely read poets in the country, so her writings on lesbian identity were not only groundbreaking and powerful but highly influential — and their impact was heightened by her public activism. In 1980 she joined New Jewish Agenda; in 1982, she published “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity.” (Rich has been a life subscriber to Jewish Currents magazine, which sponsors Jewdayo, for more than three decades. She has also translated poems by Yiddish poets Kadya Molodowsky and Celia Dropkin.) In 1997, Rich rejected the National Medal of Arts (proffered by President Clinton) in protest of how, as she wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “both major parties have displayed a crude affinity for the interests of corporate power while deserting the majority of the people, especially the most vulnerable.”

“Art is both tough and fragile. It speaks of what we long to hear and what we dread to find.” —Adrienne Rich

Note: Adrienne Rich died at 82 on March 27, 2012.