As self-identified lesbian feminists, they openly negotiated the difficulties of their very different racial and economic realities.

Her understanding that the ethicacy of our personal relationships was dependent on the ethics of our political and cultural systems was demonstrated not only in her poetry but also in her essays, her interviews, and in conversations like the extended one she conducted with the poet and essayist Audre Lorde.ĭespite the vital friendship between Lorde and Rich, or perhaps because of it, both poets were able to question their own everyday practices of collusion with the very systems that oppressed them. Rich claimed, in “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet,” from 1984, that Baldwin was the “first writer I read who suggested that racism was poisonous to white as well as destructive to Black people.” It was Rich who suggested to me that silence, too, was poisonous and destructive to our social interactions and self-knowledge. My initial understanding of feminism and racism came from these two writers in the same weeks and months.

In my copy of Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken,” the faded yellow highlighter still remains recognizable on pages after more than thirty years: “Both the victimization and the anger experienced by women are real, and have real sources, everywhere in the environment, built into society, language, the structures of thought.” As a nineteen-year-old, I read in Rich and Baldwin a twinned dissatisfaction with systems invested in a single, dominant, oppressive narrative. Here was a poet who seemed, by a miracle, a twin: I had not known till then how much I had wanted a contemporary and a woman as a speaking voice of life”-I was immediately drawn to Rich’s interest in what echoes past the silences in a life that wasn’t necessarily my life. And though I did not have the critic Helen Vendler’s experience upon encountering Rich-“Four years after she published her first book, I read it in almost disbelieving wonder someone my age was writing down my life. “Leaflets,” “Diving into the Wreck,” and “The Dream of a Common Language,” from 1978_,_ were all examples of this, as were her other works, all the way to her final poems, in 2012. Rich’s interrogation of the “guarding” of systems was the subject of everything she wrote in the years leading up to my introduction to her work. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself-that is to say, risking oneself.

Most people guard and keep they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.

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