2012.04.20: Adrienne Rich - A Memorial with Eric Karpeles

Tribute to Adrienne Rich Presentation by Eric Karpeles Adrienne Rich, who died at her home in Santa Cruz on March 27, 2012, was a writer and thinker of enormous stature. Her first book of poetry was singled out by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets series in 1951 and Rich continued publishing books of poems in every subsequent decade. She used her awareness of herself as a woman—full of passion and compassion, gentleness, rage—as a framework to understand the inequities of modern life. Unabashed in her critical thinking, she possessed a unique and oracular voice in American poetry. …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 wave 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. —Adrienne Rich, from “Planetarium,” 1971 Find out more about The New School at tns.commonweal.org.