“For the Relief of the Body and the Reconstruction of the Mind”: Adrienne Rich’s Metamorphoses

Abstract

By looking at Adrienne Rich’s poetic and political transitions, this article attempts to demonstrate how her politics of location galvanized her into writing a “whole new poetry.” The source of its newness lies, however, not so much in avantgardist formal experimentation, but rather in its rootedness in the complexities of lived corporeal experience. It is the body that emerges in Rich’s later writing as a primary form of the subject’s locatedness – the “geography closest in.” Importantly, she views the body as a site of potentiality rather than a passive surface of sociopolitical inscriptions, and refers to corporeal materiality without falling into the trap of naive essentialism. As I argue, such conceptualization of the body makes Rich’s work particularly interesting from the neo-materialist perspective.