Collected Poems

The tigers in the panel that she made

Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

W. H. Auden selected Rich’s volume and brought to the world’s attention Rich’s first thorny questions, embedded in lyrics, addressing a culture’s disengagement with its embattled selves.

Rich began her public poetic career as the 1951 winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize for her first collection, A Change of World.

abandoned by humanity compounded by the experience of not being heard.”

profound exploration of ethical loneliness.

By my late twenties, the early 1990s, I was in graduate school at Columbia University and came across Rich’s recently published An Atlas of the Difficult World.

The Uses Of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” an essay published in 1981, “I cannot hide my anger to spare your guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action.”

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

As a nineteen-year-old, I read in both Rich and Baldwin a twinned dissatisfaction with systems invested in a single, dominant, oppressive narrative. My initial understanding of feminism and racism came from these two writers in the same weeks and months.

I am a woman in the prime of life
driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce