Your influential prose and poetry had profoundly helped me express the creative turmoil from my teenage years to current adult life. For years of my academic life I wrote poems every night, as form of therapy. All in free verse, as I abhorred the rhymes that mocks my predictable route; school-home-school-home. My poems were dismissed as lackadaisical, undisciplined. I did not care at all. Then one day in the library I found your book, Twenty-One Love Poems and my sister found another book of yours, Contradictions; these brought me comfort and assurance that poems can be as comfortable and fearless as yours. I never looked back.
As an adult, I always comes back to your numerous books of poetry to reconnect to that collective expressions of universal experience by your voice and words. Every time, it is a personal grounding experience and an exploration of possibilities in multiverse. In my daily life as therapist, artist, career & family woman the whirl of tasks and obligations had disintegrated my poetic ability to few words of expletives, leaving me drained and tired. But I know, if I pick up your book and read a poem or two, the day finds a deeper meaning and the morrows shines a hope of civility.
You will be missed and here, in this obscured spot and humble existence; I just want to say how grateful I am you wrote those poems, you powered through your life and you taught me courage through your works.
XVII
" No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives, like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love..."
- Excerpt from Adrienne Rich's Twenty-One Love Poems
Acknowledgments:
Photo of Ms. Rich by Corbis from www.autostraddle.com
Excerpt of Twenty-One Love Poems XVII ; Adrienne Rich's Poetry & Prose, Gelpi et al, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, c 1993 p.84
