Poetry & Politics: Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich and the Women's Liberation Movement

FAIN: HB-268177-20

Megan Behrent
CUNY Research Foundation, NYC College of Technology (Brooklyn, NY 11201-1909)

Research and writing leading to a dual biography of modern American poets Audre Lorde (1934-1992) and Adrienne Rich (1929-2012).

Poetry & Politics draws on the poetry, prose and archives of Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich to develop an intellectual history that focuses on the lifelong friendship between the two poets and theorists who met at the City University of New York in 1968. Using archival research and interviews in addition to their published work, I examine and historicize Lorde and Rich’s passionate, fraught and deeply political friendship to consider how years of debate shaped the evolution of their political thought, their aesthetic and political sensibility as artists, and the development of an anti-racist, anti-capitalist, feminist poetry and praxis. In doing so, I develop an intellectual history of their political thought as part of a community of radical, anti-racist, socialist, lesbian feminists, while contextualizing their work within larger debates about race, class and sexuality within the women’s liberation.

Associated Products

"A Way of Knowing:" Adrienne Rich's Marxism & the Poetics of Revolution (Article)
Title: "A Way of Knowing:" Adrienne Rich's Marxism & the Poetics of Revolution
Author: Megan Behrent
Abstract: Adrienne Rich writes in "Dreamwood" "poetry/isn't revolution but a way of knowing/why it must come" (Fact of a Doorframe 225). Here, and throughout her work, Rich argues for an understanding of poetry that is inextricably intertwined with a political analysis of the world and an urgent belief in the necessity of social change. While Rich is renowned as a poet of the Women's Liberation Movement (WLM), far less attention has been paid to her later political writing and the development of her political thought from radical feminism to Marxism. Drawing on published writing and archival research, this article traces the trajectory of Adrienne Rich's political thought after the WLM's decline, focusing on her articulation of a "politics of location" and her contributions to Marxism, which I argue are vastly underappreciated and essential to Rich's intellectual history and her political and poetic legacy in the twenty-first century.
Year: 2022
Primary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/857757
Primary URL Description: Link to the article via Project Muse.
Secondary URL: https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/48027
Secondary URL Description: Link to the entire special issue of Arizona Quarterly on Adrienne Rich.
Access Model: Subscription based and available through Project Muse. There will be a designated period during which the entire issue will be made open access.
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory
Publisher: John Hopkins University Press

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