(AP Photo/Stuart Ramson)   Adrienne Rich, a major figure in the recent history of American poetry and a frequent contributor to The Nation, died on March 27. In addition to the twenty-two poems she contributed over fifty years, she also wrote essays and reviewed for the magazine; a remark in her review of John Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs could serve as self-analysis: “One is conscious, as in few other poets, of a steely thread of strength running through the dislocation and the ruin.”

She also spoke up as a reader: in a 1993 letter to the editor, she urged the magazine to refuse “to drift toward the so-called center, a nerveless, benumbed position produced by the very financial and political interests that need to be called to account.” In the first of ten reviews the magazine ran of her work, Cheryl Walker identified the best qualities of her work, and their likely source:

This poetry is deadly serious, but it is not, like so much of women’s poetry in the past, death-enamored. For it is the poet’s appetite, her undeniable life force, which sustains these operations.

Through the years the reviews were positive, if cantankerously so: in 1978, Donald Hall noted that “she has a gift for being herself, much the way certain film actors possess the rare and difficult genius—which looks easy—of always seeming natural.” The same year, Hayden Carruth said that “The Dream of a Common Language may be a masterpiece.” A decade later, Marilyn Hacker observed that the crowds of hundreds that packed Rich’s readings may not “like, or even totally comprehend, what they hear that is new,” but almost every audience member “will carry, in memory, at least one poem of Rich’s that resonated, that made a difference in her or his life.” Lawrence Joseph summarized her project best:

For Rich, the poet inside a wrecked society must will an imagined common language to get to human love, which is for her the central subject of any personal or social order. A poetry of ideological commitment must enter the heart and mind, become as real as one’s body, as vital as life itself—that’s what makes it poetry.

—Jordan Davis, Poetry Editor

In memory of Rich's contributions to progressive politics and poetry, The Nation features below some of her poems published in the magazine in over five decades of writing.

At Willard Brook November 18, 1961

Spirit like water moulded by unseen stone and sandbar, pleats and funnels according to its own submerged necessity — to the indolent eye pure wilfulness, to the stray pine-needle boiling in that cascade-bent pool a random fury: Law, if that's what's wanted, lies asking to be read in the dried brook-bed.

For Example November 23, 1963

Sometimes you meet an old man whose fist isn't clenched blue-white. Someone like that old poet

whose grained palm once travelled the bodies of sick children. Back in the typed line

was room for everything: the blue grape hyacinth patch, the voluntary touch

of cheek on breast, the ear alert for a changed heartbeat and for other sounds too

that live in a typed line: the breath of animals, stopping and starting up of busses,

trashfires in empty lots. Attention once given returned again as power.

An old man's last few evenings might be inhabited not by a public—

fountains of applause off auditorium benches, tributes read at hotel banquets—

but by reverberations the ear had long desired, accepted and absorbed.

The late poem might be written in a night suddenly awake with quiet new sounds

as when a searchlight plays  against the dark bush-tangle and birds speak in reply.

Translations December 25, 1972

You show me the poems of some woman my age, or younger translated from your language

Certain words occur: enemy, oven, sorrow enough to let me know she's a woman of my time

obsessed

with Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls baked it like bread in our ovens worn it like lead on our ankles watched it through binoculars as if it were a helicopter bringing food to our famine or the satellite of a hostile power

I begin to see that woman doing things: stirring rice ironing a skirt typing a manuscript till dawn

trying to make a call from a phonebooth

The phone rings endlessly in a man's bedroom she hears him telling someone else Never mind. She'll get tired. hears him telling her story to her sister

who becomes her enemy and will in her own way light her own way to sorrow

ignorant of the fact this way of grief is shared, unnecessary and political

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve May 26, 2008 

Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon's eyelid

later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere

Tonight I think no poetry will serve

Syntax of rendition:

verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action

verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on doing

there are adjectives up for sale

now diagram the sentence

Quarto June 8, 2009

1. Call me Sebastian, arrows sticking all over The map of my battlefields. Marathon. Wounded Knee. Vicksburg. Jericho. Battle of the Overpass. Victories turned inside out But no surrender

Cemeteries of remorse The beaten champion sobbing Ghosts move in to shield his tears

2. No one writes lyric on a battlefield On a map stuck with arrows But I think I can do it if I just lurk In my tent pretending to Refeather my arrows

I'll be right there! I yell When they come with their crossbows and white phosphorus To recruit me Crouching over my drafts lest they find me out and shoot me

3. Press your cheek against my medals, listen through them to my heart Doctor, can you see me if I'm naked?

Spent longer in this place than in the war No one comes but rarely and I don't know what for

Went to that desert as many did before Farewell and believing and hope not to die

Hope not to die and what was the life Did we think was awaiting after

Lay down your stethoscope back off on your skills Doctor can you see me when I'm naked?

4. I'll tell you about the mermaid Sheds swimmable tail Gets legs for dancing Sings like the sea with a choked throat Knives straight up her spine Lancing every step There is a price There is a price For every gift And all advice