"When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" by Adrienne Rich

"Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society" (Rich 167)*

p. 168 has a very rich paragraph about the position of Man in the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Diane Wakoski, but it is the following quote that serves what I'm looking for at this moment: "And, in the work of both these poets, it is finally the woman's sense of herself-- embattled, possessed-- that gives the poetry its dynamic charge, its rhythms of struggle, need, will, and female energy" (168).

"...I was looking in them for the same things I had found in the poetry of men, because I wanted women poets to be the equals of men, and to be equal was still confused with sounding the same" (171).

"Looking back at poems I wrote before I was twenty-one, I'm startled because beneath the conscious craft are glimpses of the split I even then experienced between the girl who wrote the poems, who defined herself in writing poems, and the girl who was to define herself by her relationships with men" (171).

"For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive. And a certain freedom of mind is needed-- freedom to press on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, know that your motion can be sustained, the the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away" (174).

"You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming" (174; emphasis mine)


"...much poetry by women...is charged with anger. I think we need to go through that anger, and we will betray our own reality if we try, as Virginia Woolf was trying, for an objectivity, a detachment that would make us sound more like Jane Austen or Shakespeare" (176)

When I read this essay, I can't help but think about how it was written in 1971; this version was taken from Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition, edited in 1993. In the introduction to "When We Dead Awaken..." the editors note that: "The challenge flung by feminists at the accepted literary canon, at the methods of teaching it, and at the biased and astigmatic view of male 'literary scholarship,' has not diminished in the decade since the first Women's Forum; it has become broadened and intensified..." essentially by challenges made and questions posed by other identity groups (166). As it is necessary, people in society cling to people of similar experience, whether they claim a name for themselves or not, which means the challenge to this canon is going to be constantly evolving, constantly re-signified. In 1993, Judith Butler had already released Gender Trouble, which points to this...hmm. A guess a good next step to take would be to revisit "A Poetics of Transit" and see how my thoughts can really be used for re-vision (as well as other things?). I need to revise this essay as well, as it will serve as an excellent jumping-off point for the rest of my project.

Hmmmm....I'm still up for the challenge. I keep thinking of a poem I wrote last spring, "The Mummer at the Caldwell Night Rodeo." It feels almost like a summary, the seeds of images that need to be inhabited in order to be felt. I think it's a nifty juxtaposition to ponder; the pageantry of the festivals of cultures on separate coasts, and there is no need for me to introduce the "I" into the poem, but at the same time I need to inhabit the bodies of a mummer and of a cowboy and insert some real feeling, something sensory, luscious...

I will start this experiment with revising this poem.