Edited By- Malavika Suresh
The woman Adrienne Rich writes of in Twenty-One Love Poems is as much a dream as the cautiously flitting sonnet sequence in the former feels like, the unnamed, vaguely threatening “you” captured perfectly in snatches of a yet-misunderstood love. Rich was one of the first openly lesbian poets in America to write about and celebrate her experience as a queer woman. This collection, as part of a larger anthology called The Dream of a Common Language, explores both the possibilities of writing the self into language as well as its conceivability in relatively nascent (at the time) realms of desire: that of female homosexual relationships.
There is a fragile temporality to her poems that seems out of place with Rich’s unshakeable voice and aggrandizing style, seeking control of her nebulous subject while also engaging unceremoniously in the act of letting go. Her portrayal of love, of a relationship that appears constantly to blur the lines between the deeply personal and the frustratingly political, is at its finest when it is generous. We catch her finding beauty in the “early light of spring”, in listening to Nina Simone and “drinking delicious coffee, delicious music.” Mere mundanity is thus fervently converted to visions of the overtly romantic. One is drawn to the universality of Rich’s poetry while simultaneously being mindful of their novelty, of their niche allegiance. It is perhaps this, along with transcending boundaries of the sonnet form and its association with a protracted line of overwhelmingly male poets, that is her greatest triumph.
We move, thus, from present-day Manhattan to a succession of short-lived rural landscapes, from “rain-soaked garbage” and the cruel “blurt of metal” to virgin terrain where her lover’s silence is no more and no less than “a pond where drowned things live”. Some of the poems in the latter category come across as distinctly utopian, imagining a country with no apprehension of language or law. This is, of course, a poignantly satiric critique of the heterosexist gaze. Poems 6 to 13 in particular describe love that is experienced outside the realm of male-owned language: a language that is slippery, disjointed, and on the face of it, impenetrable.
In an interview with Elly Bulkin, Rich said that she attempted, in Twenty-One Love Poems, to “constantly relate the lovers to a larger world. You’re never just in bed together in a private space; you just can’t be…acutely threatened by women’s love for each other.” Despite her promises, then, her imagined landscapes turn to dust and by the sixteenth sonnet we return duly, sullenly to a changed Manhattan, for lovers who have changed see the world differently. Inevitable sorrow feeds into her narrative of a history successfully rewritten; but at what cost, I found myself wondering when I read the book for the first time at fifteen. How does one purge memory by writing oneself into it? Does it become less painful? More?
But so much of Twenty-One is about the imagined other(s), displaced pain and hazard shining through the final poems of the sequence like glass shards; and we are left to think about the unyieldingly political, about “the forces they have ranged against us…the forces we had ranged within us”. Perhaps now more than ever, Rich’s timeless collection can be hailed as a polemic of sorts, a determined invitation to revise not just any history, but to make it irredeemably, indissolubly, your own.