Anti-war poet mixes politics with aesthetics

Adrienne Rich, a 77-year-old writer and feminist who made headlines in 1997 when she refused to accept an award from President Clinton, read from poems spanning her half-century career to a McCormick Hall audience yesterday.

"The victory carried like a corpse / from town to town / begins to crawl in the casket," Rich read, quoting from her 1971 poem "Letters: March 1969." Much of her poetry involves meditations on the Vietnam War and castigations of the Bush administration.

"There's a mainstream idea that you sacrifice aesthetics if you write about political positions," she said at a reception after the reading. "I don't think that's true."

In one of her most pointed and overtly political poems, Rich sets her sights on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld '54, subverting his oft-referenced quote about troop readiness.

Responding to charges that the army entered the Iraq War ill-equipped, Rumsfeld stated, "You go to war with the army you have."

"You come back from war with the body you have," reads Rich's poem "Calibrations," which is set in a military hospital full of soldiers who have lost limbs in Iraq.

Rich mentioned the Poets Against the War movement, a campaign begun by writer Sam Hamill in 2003 to protest the war in Iraq, as an example of the political impact that poetry can have. The movement encouraged poets across America to send antiwar poetry to the White House.

"Thousands of poems came in, not all of them from published poets," Rich said. "It was a great way of making a statement."

The campaign began when Laura Bush had what Rich termed "the ridiculous idea" to invite several poets, including Hamill, a self-described pacifist, to the White House for a symposium on American poetry. The symposium was cancelled after the White House learned of the campaign.

When asked if she had been invited to the symposium, Rich laughed.

"There was no way she would have invited me, since I'd already turned down an invite from Clinton," said Rich, who will receive a National Book Awards medal on Nov. 15.

"They were afraid I'd cause trouble," she added.

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In 1997, Rich refused to accept the prestigious National Medal of Arts — the highest award given to artists by the U.S. government — from Clinton. In a letter of explanation to the National Endowment for the Arts, she wrote that "the very meaning of art is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration," faulting Clinton for failing to close the gap between the rich and the poor and for underfunding arts programs.

Rich's first book of poetry, "A Change of World," was published in 1951 by the Yale Younger Poets series and edited by W.H. Auden. "Radicalized" by her experiences as a wife and mother in the 1950s, she became involved in the feminist movement and began to explore more controversial issues — from the Vietnam War to homosexuality — in her poetry.

Rich made light of her age several times through the reading, sponsored by the Program in the Study of Women and Gender and the Princeton Public Lecture Committee. She paused halfway through "Letters: March 1969," the second poem she read, to clarify a reference to obsolete technology.

"How many people in the room remember carbon copies?" Rich asked.

Fewer than a dozen people in the packed auditorium raised their hands.

"That was back in the days of typewriters. That's how you used to send copies of poems to your friends, and they'd get smudgier and smudgier as you made more," she explained to the rest of the crowd.

She picked up another photocopied page from the stand beside her and continued reading. "But this winter's dashed off in pencil," she read, "torn off the pad too fast / for those skills."