Adrienne Rich (photo by Lilian Kemp)
She wasn’t the most visible poet in Santa Cruz by any means, but Adrienne Rich was certainly its greatest. The winner of a National Book Award, MacArthur “genius” grant, two Guggenheims and numerous other distinctions died in her Santa Cruz home on Tuesday, March 27 from complications related to rheumatoid arthritis.
Though she’d lived in Santa Cruz since the 1980s, a decade after she had divorced her husband and come out as a lesbian, Rich did not take a highly public role in her adopted hometown, leaving that to others. Instead she maintained posts as a lecturer at Stanford University, San Jose State University and Scripps College, served as a professor-at-large at Cornell University and continued writing books of poetry and essays for which she continued to receive acclaim. She seldom gave interviews, though she did occasionally appear at local bookstores, even in recent years. A planned reading last February at Bookshop Santa Cruz of her book Tonight No Poetry Will Serve: Poems 2007–2010 was cancelled “due to personal circumstances.”
Rich, who got involved with the New Left in the mid-1960s in New York, remained a lifelong voice for peace, civil rights, feminism and decent treatment for all, and famously rejected the National Medal of Arts in 1997, explaining in a letter to President Clinton her reasons. “The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate,” she wrote. “A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”
Referring to Congress’ vote to slash National Endowment for the Arts funding, she wrote, “[Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage.”
Rich maintained her radicalism to the end. In 2009, upon the publication of A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008, she wrote this to then-Metro Santa Cruz writer Molly Zapp, who had written Rich to ask if it was accurate to describe her as a socialist:
“Socialism has been a confused term in the vocabulary of capitalism. I see it as the sharing of essential material and social resources by all, a ‘common wealth’ of all, a responsibility of each and all. Such a system can never be perfected; it must constantly be evolving, recognizing new needs and conditions. It's an idea that's been argued, lived for and died for over centuries, around the world. In those terms I can certainly call myself a socialist. A socialist without a party or a country, for whom both feminism and Marxism have been essential strands.”
