Adrienne Rich. Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations.

St. Andrews, B.A.

New York. Norton. 2001. 190 pages. $23.95. ISBN 0-393-05045-9

ADRIENNE RICH, author of sixteen volumes of poetry and four books of prose, including the remarkable Of Woman Born, has produced no single volume of greater value than this collection. It is a necessary text, one that does more than record historical time and national place. Necessary texts analyze unquestioned attitudes; they probe the superficialities that pose as cultural depths, taking the measure of an age and weighing that against intricate self-delusion. Rich's book wrestles with the angel of collective assumption. Essay after essay, her writing also does nothing less than call the question of how a great and rich civilization can challenge itself to be not only great but good.

Arts of the Possible externalizes various debates raging within the passionate mind of Adrienne Rich, educated in the traditions of both poetry and the essay. She has recorded thirty years of visions and revisions regarding key issues in her self and her society. Her writing is unflinching not because she redefines the Truth but because she serves it, not because she answers questions but because she raises them at all.

For this service to society, she has been rewarded, say some, and punished, say others. The former note her National Book Award, the Lenore Marshall/Nation prize, the MacArthur Fellowship. (Her critics mention her refusal of the coveted National Medal for the Arts as if she has shredded the flag. In front of the children. During the Super Bowl.) Those who believe she has been routinely discredited or dismissed for her scrutiny of issues mention the usual string of adjectives affixed to her name: lesbian Adrienne Rich, Marxist Adrienne Rich, feminist Adrienne Rich.

If these are meant to be somewhat distancing identifiers, the force of Rich's eloquence and argument usually unmasks their use as an intellectually and spiritually useless ploy. Yet these labels can effectively impose silence, and that grave consequence centers Rich's gritty, fearless, searching Arts of the Possible. Besides calling for valorous discourse, the book investigates what precisely is assumed to be "political." Art that accepts and even promotes entrenched and so-called "normative" assumptions and definitions is rarely to be considered "political."

Among those putatively nonpolitical, unquestionable certainties, Rich places a heterosexuality that poses as morality and capitalism that poses as democracy. As Rich notes in her introduction, "I seem not to speak the official language." Fortunately. And, to the credit of both American common readers and its cultural lions, some of Rich's most argumentative writing--"When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision," "why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts," and "Dream of a Common Language," for example--have been integrated into the fabric of our intellectual, if not daily, lives.

"When a woman tells the truth," Rich states flatly in "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying," "she is creating the possibility for more truth around her." Many of her apprehensions read like palimpsests of ancient warnings. For example, her notes on democracy being ill-served (even doomed) by its unwillingness to invest in a well-educated populace and by its political language of self-aggrandizement, obfuscation, complacency, and economic paternalism perfectly echo the warning of an Athenian democrat named Socrates.

What is finally so glorious about this solid, difficult, challenging book of essays and interviews is that it opens so many opportunities for contemplating "big issues": the meaning of life, social responsibility, personal identity in our complex historical moment, coping with social and personal change, whether spiritual progress is an essential component in the old Darwinian paradigm.

Read this book not because Rich is right but because she helps move dialogue along, because she helps a citizen challenge assumptions. Some of her posits are cinders in the eye; some of her own biases are compensated for by phrasing that is pure poetic logic. In almost every page of this remarkable book by a remarkable American woman, Rich requires of us an ancient, humble, salubrious act: a rigorous examination of conscience with the aim of self-governance and self-improvement.

B. A. St. Andrews
SUNY Center for Bioethics &
Humanities, Syracuse