I've done a poor job with my poet of the month idea! Well actually I haven't done a lot of posting lately. I'm going to try and catch up a little and post a few poems over the next week by Adrienne Rich. She was February/March poet and I think I've only posted one poem. . .
At age 22, Adrienne Rich was selected by W.H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for A Change of World. She's been called one of the most influential poets of the 20th century. In 1997, she refused the National Medal of Arts, saying "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration."
Power
Living in the earth-deposits of our history
Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate
Today I was reading about Marie Curie:
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness
her body bombarded for years by the element
she had purified
It seems she denied to the end
the source of the cataracts on her eyes
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil
She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power
Adrienne Rich
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