Susanna J. Sturgis   Martha's Vineyard writer and editor
writer editor born-again horse girl

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Fancy Meeting You Here

April 14, 2007

So I'm in the homestretch (it's a very long homestretch) of this interminable copyedit (it's a very long manuscript). It's political science, I think. What I know is that it's patriarchal, quintessentially, hyperbolically, murderously, suicidally patriarchal. I come to the beginning of the last chapter before the codas and epilogues and endnotes. The epigraph for the last chapter is from Adrienne Rich.

Not only is it from Adrienne Rich, it's from The Dream of a Common Language. The first poetry book I read all the way through when I didn't have to. One of a very small handful of books that permanently transformed the way I see the world and and one that is lodged forever in my cells.

Not only is it from The Dream of a Common Language, it's from "Natural Resources," possibly my favorite poem in the book.

Not only it is from "Natural Resources," it's the last six lines. My copy of Dream of a Common Language is split down the spine. The second half begins with the last page of "Natural Resources," which ends with these lines:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed

I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,

with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.

This author -- how to say it? He quotes at least a hundred men in his book, maybe hundreds, and only a scant handful of women. Nearly all the women are academics. If any of them are feminists, their political proclivities are well hidden. This author pays lip service to women's rights, but mainly (I strongly suspect) because the jihadists he fears and despises are against them. And here on page umpty-ump he's quoting Adrienne Rich. He's quoting from "Natural Resources."

Does he even realize that the whole poem is a celebration of the persistence of women? The miner who "goes / into the cage like the rest" is a woman. The spider -- oh how I love this spider, the one with "the passion to make and make again / where such unmaking reigns" -- is a woman. And what they're persisting in spite of is what this author celebrates: war. (Of course the author doesn't celebrate war indiscriminately, but he is a cheerleader for wars in which "we" depose tyrants, liberate the downtrodden, and avert further proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Like that war. You know the one I mean.)

So how did my author come across Adrienne Rich? Does he know who she is? Has he read any of her work? Maybe someone just handed him those six lines and said, "Here, you said you were looking for an epigraph." He had the six lines set solid. "Natural Resources" is in two-line stanzas. I added space breaks (#s) and the missing comma after "power."

For a moment I wondered: do I know anybody who might know somebody who could get a message to Adrienne Rich that this guy is using six lines from "Natural Resources" as a chapter epigraph? Probably. But I stopped at the wondering. This guy quoting Adrienne Rich is too deliciously spine-tinglingly weird to mess with. Would I dream of interfering with the sound of one hand clapping? No way. Some not-sounds have to be heard to be believed.


P.S. April 17: I didn't try to get a message to the poet, but I did note on the manuscript that the lines might not be the best epigraph for the chapter, and why.

 

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