"I needed history of fox"; or "State vs memory"

For my 686 poetry class, I've been given this assignment: 6-8 page paper on the state of the contemporary American lyric, as demonstrated in work by Robert Hass, Lucille Clifton, Galway Kinnell, Barbara Hamby, or Adrienne Rich. I decided I'd work with poems by Adrienne Rich, primarily because I remember enjoying "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" and "Planetarium" in the Women's lit courses I took at UCA. I figured Rich's poetry would be easy enough to write on, and I expected I'd talk about the contemporary lyric being used as a means of exploring sexual politics, or something like that. What I've found, though, from reading Rich's last two collections, Fox and The School Among the Ruins is that Rich is doing something more than exploring sexual and identity politics in her work: her lyrics are essentially writing history.

Take the title poem in Fox, for example. I interpret this poem as not only an exploration of the speaker's sexual identity--her desire to find a sexual history in order to buttress an invisible identity--but also a place where the lyric creates the very history the poet needs--the history of fox. Look at that last stanza. Rich is going back to to the primordial, back to a time before identity politics. In fact, this lyric rips (or, to use Rich's terms, "it means tearing and torn") proscribed identity from the female body and writes a new history for what it means to be a woman, what it means to be a gay body, and how these identities reinforce definitions of what it means to be human. You can hear Rich read this stunning poem here.

Fox

I needed fox Badly I needed
a vixen for the long time none had come near me
I needed recognition from a triangulated face burnt-yellow eyes
fronting the long body the fierce and sacrificial tail
I needed history of fox briars of legend it was said she had run through
I was in want of fox

And the truth of briars she had to have run through
I craved to feel on her pelt if my hands could even slide
past or her body slide between them sharp truth distressing surfaces of fur
lacerated skin calling legend to account
a vixen's courage in vixen terms

For a human animal to call for help
on another animal
is the most riven the most revolted cry on earth
come a long way down
Go back far enough it means tearing and torn endless and sudden
back far enough it blurts
into the birth-yell of the yet-to-be human child
pushed out of a female the yet-to-be woman

This simultaneous exploration and creation of history is as work in another poem from the same collection, "Veterans Day." I'll just share with you the second movement of the poem (note the exquisite use of pauses):

2.

Trying to think about
something else--what?---when

the store broke
the scissor fingered prestidigitators

snipped the links of concentration
State vs memory

State vs unarmed citizen
wounded by no foreign blast or shell

forced into the sick-field
brains-out coughing downwind

backing into the alley hands shielding eyes
under glare-lit choppers coming through low

State vs memory. That's the key. That's the role of Rich's lyric. She's navigating the space between what institutionalized history wants us to know and the truths present in our cultural memory. The role of the contemporary American lyric is to hold history accountable, then, to give a voice to the stories of queerness and other victims of America's other wars on difference. The role of the contemporary American lyric is insult the dominant paradigm with the difference it wishes to suppress and villianize. My God, poetry can change everything.

And, Houston, we have a thesis statement.