1 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
two fellow nominees, both African American women, Audre Lorde and Alice
Walker. Soon afterward, Rich “came out” as a lesbian; in 1976 she began a relation-
ship with writer-activist Michelle Cliff and published Twenty-One Love Poems, a
collection written explicitly for a lesbian audience. A prolific poet, Rich continued
to use a subjective stance to uncover the relationship between individual and social
identities, the personal and the political, in works such as The Dream of a Common
Language: Poems, 1974–1977 (1978), Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Time’s
Power: Poems, 1985–1988 (1989), An Atlas of the Diff icult World: Poems, 1988–1991
(1991), Dark Fields of the Republic, 1991–1995 (1995), Fox: Poems, 1998–2000
(2001), The School among the Ruins: Poems, 2000–2004 (2004), and Telephone Ring-
ing in the Labyrinth: Poems, 2004–2006 (2007); the last is her seventeenth collection
of original poems. In all, she exhibits care, sympathy, empathy, and formal innova-
tion, grounded by a lesbian and Jewish-feminist vision.
In her prose, Rich has made significant contributions to late-twentieth- and
early-twenty-first-century thinking about female experience, language, sexuality,
power, and the connection between art and politics. In Of Woman Born: Mother-
hood As Experience and Institution (1976) she combines subjective and emotional
experience (traditionally relegated to poetry and fiction) with academic research
to expose the social myths and institutions that restrict and regulate female bod-
ies and behavior. She continued the process of “re-visioning” female identity and
women’s place in society in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978
(1979) and Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979–1985 (1986), turning her
attention to women’s education, a female literary tradition, and issues related to
race and ethnicity.
Rich’s essays, like her poetry, interrogate power structures and explore the
relationships among oppression of all kinds, misrepresentations of women in
literature, “the erasure of lesbian existence,” her relationship to men (including
her father, husband, and male poets), and Jewish identity. Her work has not been
immune to criticism. Her stance on lesbian “separatism,” her repudiation of male
culture, and her conceptualization of separatism in racial terms have all been criti-
cized, as has her formulation of “compulsory heterosexuality” as the main factor
in female oppression. She has also been accused of emphasizing content rather
than form, sacrificing poetic artistry for her political messages. Her response has
been an ongoing and open attempt, as she wrote early in her career, “to carry my
thoughts on feminism and racism beyond the confines of my own mind.”
From the 1990s onward, Rich has increasingly turned her attention to con-
nections between poetry and politics in her prose works. In What Is Found There:
Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (1993), Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversa-
tions (2001), and A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997–2008 (2009), Rich
elaborates a rejection of the separation between artistic and practical expression,
highlighting the role of creativity in the political process. She also upholds the
need for resistance in art and life; in “Why I Refused the National Medal of the
Arts,” an open letter included in Arts of the Possible, she describes her act as a
refusal to accept the politics of the U.S. government.
Rich has taught at many institutions, including Swarthmore College and
Columbia, Brandeis, Bryn Mawr, Rutgers, Cornell, Stanford, and San Jose State