Arts of the Possible Essays and Conversations

by Rich, Adrienne

• ISBN13: 9780393050455
• ISBN10: 0393050459
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-04-17
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

"I am a poet who knows the social power of poetry, a United States citizen who knows herself irrevocably tangled in her society's hopes, arrogance, and despair," Adrienne Rich writes. The essays in Arts of the Possible search for possibilities beyond a compromised, degraded system, seeking to imagine something else. They call on the fluidity of the imagination, from poetic vision to social justice, from the badlands of political demoralization to an art that might wound, that may open scars when engaged in its work, but will finally suture and not tear apart. This volume collects Rich's essays from the last decade of the twentieth century, including four earlier essays, as well as several conversations that go further than the usual interview. Also included is her essay explaining her reasons for declining the National Medal for the Arts.

Table of Contents

Foreword	1	(9)
``When We Dead Awaken'': Writing as Re-Vision	10	(20)
Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying	30	(11)
Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet	41	(21)
Notes toward a Politics of Location	62	(21)
Raya Dunayevskaya's Marx	83	(15)
Why I Refused the National Medal for the Arts	98	(8)
Defying the Space That Separates	106	(9)
Poetry and the Public Sphere	115	(5)
Muriel Rukeyser: Her Vision	120	(8)
Some Questions from the Profession	128	(10)
Interview with Rachel Spence	138	(8)
Arts of the Possible	146	(23)
Notes	169	(8)
Acknowledgments	177	(2)
Index	179