Issue 35 | March-April 2015

The enduring power of Adrienne Rich

A Note from the Editor: I have been so privileged to have the chance to edit this special issue on Adrienne Rich, in commemoration of the third anniversary of her death. The essays you’ll find…

Adrienne Rich in Chile: an Interview

Adrienne Rich travelled to Santiago, Chile, in March 2001 to attend ChilePoesía’s inaugural gathering of international poets. The weeklong festivities included both large-scale public readings and smaller events in Santiago,…

Syntax as Power: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich

  The Critical Flame’s invitation to write on Adrienne Rich has pushed me to a long overdue assessment of what her poetry once meant to me and how it stacks…

Witness: #BlackLivesMatter, Claudia Rankine, and Adrienne Rich

Catch if you can your country’s moment, begin where any calendar’s ripped-off —Adrienne Rich, “An Atlas of the Difficult World” In thinking about how Adrienne Rich speaks to our present struggles…

Best American: Adrienne Rich’s Radical Canonization

When my first undergraduate poetry professor taught “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” and “Diving into the Wreck” side by side, to demonstrate how Rich’s work was transformed by feminism, I marveled how…

Notes Toward a Politics of Location

View image | gettyimages.com 1. “I am to speak these words in Europe, but I have been searching for them in the United States of America.” This is how Adrienne…

6 Writers on the Lasting Influence of Adrienne Rich

  Over the course of her long career, Adrienne Rich influenced innumerable poets, critics, editors, feminists and other activists. It would be hard to account for the breadth of it. Since my…

Implied Freedom: Rich’s Radical Writer/Teacher

I am a writer, primarily of poems, but also of criticism, essays, and fiction. Over the last decade I have taught courses in geology, ecology, outdoor living skills, and writing. I’ve…

The One Who Find Our Way: Finding My Mother in “Diving into the Wreck”

View image | gettyimages.com In my junior year in college I enrolled in a two-credit course in typesetting. The final project involved hand-setting a poem of our choice. I may…

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