Adrienne Rich, 1929-2012

Adrienne Rich died this week. I’ve read very little of her work. Still, I feel her loss. As little as I knew her work and I didn't know her, I know she was important to women important to me. Women I respect and care about even the many whose names I don’t know. 

I read that in 1974 when she won the National Book Award, she accepted it with Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, two Black women, one a self-identified lesbian. They accepted the award for all women. 

Later, according to The New York Times,

In 1997, in a widely reported act, Ms. Rich declined the National Medal of Arts, the United States government’s highest award bestowed upon artists. In a letter to Jane Alexander, then chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, which administers the award, she expressed her dismay, amid the “increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice,” that the government had chosen to honor “a few token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.”

I feel a heaviness. A sadness at the loss of such a writer, such a woman.

I feel like I’m making progress on my writing then I’m humbled. I know it's not a bad thing. 

Thank you, Adrienne, for all you did, for all you wrote. 

16 May 1929 - 27 March 2012