Yale Bulletin and Calendar

September 24, 2004|Volume 33, Number 4

Adrienne Rich

Prize-winning poet Adrienne Rich
will read from her work

Acclaimed poet Adrienne Rich, the most recent recipient of the prestigious Bollingen Prize for Poetry, will read from her work during a campus visit on Thursday, Sept. 30.

Her reading will take place at 4 p.m. at Battell Chapel, corner of Elm and College streets. The event is free and open to the public.

Rich has described her work as "a dialectical relationship" between "the personal, or lyric voice, and the so-called political ... the voice of the individual speaking not just to herself, or to a beloved friend, but to and from a collective, a social realm." She covers such topics as poverty, racism, sexism, violence and love between women. Her poetry is taught in English and women's studies courses across the country, and she is noted also as a teacher and political activist.

Since winning the Yale Younger Poets Award in 1951 for her first book, "A Change of World," Rich has garnered many prizes and honors for her work. She was the recipient of the 1999 Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Common Wealth Award in Literature, the National Book Award, the 1996 Tanning Award for Mastery in the Art of Poetry (The Wallace Stevens Award) and a MacArthur Fellowship. She won the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 2003.

Rich is the author of more than 15 volumes of poetry, including "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law," "Diving into the Wreck" (for which she won the 1974 National Book Award), "The Dream of a Common Language," "The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001," "Time's Power: Poems 1985-1988," "An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991," "Collected Early Poems: 1950-1970" and "Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995." Her most recent collection of poems is "The School Among the Ruins."

The poet has also authored four books of non-fiction prose, including "Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution" and "What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics." "Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversation" is the title of Rich's most recent book of essays.

T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S

Grant to support research on role of viruses in cancer

Series honors graduation of Yale's first Chinese student 150 years ago

Program marks 35th anniversary of Afro-American Cultural Center

Study: Recreational gambling can be good for seniors' health

Yale launches $1 million United Way drive

Symposium to explore past and future of suburbanization

Event honors late historian of American South

New bioscience company at Science Park offering . . .

Exhibit showcases work of long-ignored landscape artist

Mayhew lauded for his studies of party politics

Congress' only Holocaust survivor to discuss . . .

Noted playwright to speak about his life, Jewish religion

Prize-winning poet Adrienne Rich will read from her work

Older marathon runners are making greater strides . . .

Cultivating a culture of trust was topic of inaugural conference

Dwight Hall interns devote the summer to causes in New Haven

Reimbursements now available through direct deposit

IN MEMORIAM