12 contemporary poetry
The search for the direct representation of women’s experiences
through literary production was a key motivation to Rich’s poetic
evolution. In this context a new poetic was the immediate address of
the drive towards political, fi nancial and social equality for women.
Rich comments that ‘To write directly and overtly as a woman,
out of a woman’s body and experience, to take women’s existence
seriously as a theme and source for art, was something I had been
hungering to do... all my writing life’ (p. 535 ). But this acknowl-
edgement of a poetic programme was not an easy encounter since
she admits: ‘It placed me nakedly face-to-face with both terror and
anger; it did indeed imply the breakdown of the world as I had
always known it, the end of safety’ (p. 535 ). We witness this evolu-
tionary movement in Rich’s own poetry which abandons the earlier,
more constraining formality of tone, to a direct address of women’s
daily experience. The brutal admonitions of Rich’s poem from
Leafl ets ( 1969 ) entitled ‘ 5 : 30 A.M.’ are evident. In this poem the
speaker describes ‘Birds and periodic blood’ and a pharmaceutical
industry which manipulates a collective ‘us’ with ‘pills for bleeding,
pills for panic’, to which she urges ‘wash them down the sink’.^24
Rich’s slightly later volume The Will to Change ( 1971 ) includes
similar poems of protest against war, and the abuse of human and
women’s rights. Her poetry also brings to light women’s histories,
which can be seen as a part of a recuperative project of affi rming
and celebrating women’s narratives within history. ‘Planetarium’
is dedicated to Caroline Herschel (the sister of the astronomer
William Herschel), who was credited with the discovery of eight
comets. In this poem Rich makes a direct comparison between the
representation of constellations as mythic monsters – ‘a monster in
the shape of a woman / the skies are full of them’ (p. 114 ) – and the
fi gure of the female astrologer as a medium for receiving ‘heartbeat
of the pulsar’ as well as ‘encountering the NOVA’ (p. 115 ). In effect
Catherine is presented as the receptor of transmissions, she is ‘an
instrument in the shape / of a woman trying to translate pulsations’
(p. 116 ). Rich’s recuperative project would be followed by diverse
poets such as American Susan Howe’s excavations of literary texts
and documents, Irish poet Eavan Boland’s exploration of politics
and violence, and Jamaican Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze’s combination of
orality and performance to represent women’s everyday experi-