Adrienne Rich and the Function of "Asbestos Gloves"

It was in college—the academy—that I first learned to like poetry. Consequently, I like high modernist poets like Pound and Eliot. I am comfortable with poetry “in its institutional form,” as Harrington would say (506). Moreover, I always thought—and, to a certain extent, still think—that poetry is written for aesthetic appreciation. I would agree with Harrington that this high modernist understanding of poetry turns “’Poetry’” into “’a poem,’” a poem into a “text,” and the text into “a material object” (501). Four of five years ago, if someone had asked me, “why read a poem?” I would have responded by asking, “why look at a picture, or why listen to a symphony?” In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot does not think that this distinction is all that important. He uses the words “artist,” “poet,” “art,” and “poetry” interchangeably. My experience in poetry workshops, where emphasis was placed on “craft” and “technique,” only reinforced the high modernist conception of poetry. The public wanted an aesthetic experience.

But obviously words are not like paint or stone. First, they are not material. Second, they are used for expression and communication, and any brief glimpse at the history of poetry will demonstrate how poetry has not always been crafted for purely aesthetic reasons. Even Eliot and Pound express ideas and emotions in their poetry. Their poems are about “the news that stays news” (Pound) and “the mind of Europe” (Eliot). Some of what they have to say is offensive. Most of it is certainly not “inspirational” like the poetry that Harrington finds outside of the academy. I am still haunted by the lack of inspiration that I find in most of the poetry that I read, and while I do not agree with all of what Rich argues in “When We Dead Awaken,” I can see why she is troubled by the “deep pessimism and fatalistic grief” that she finds in poetry written by men (25). The public can get “deep pessimism and fatalistic grief” from the news, even the kind that does not stay news, so why read this kind of dark poetry?

I find many of Rich’s early poems well crafted, but somewhat pessimistic. “Living in Sin,” for example, ends with an amazing simile: “she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming / like a relentless milkman up the stairs.” However, the poem’s bleakness resembles that of Eliot’s “Preludes.” As Rich struggles to express her own experiences and feelings and begins to remove the “asbestos gloves” of formalism, her poetry becomes less pessimistic, but not less aesthetically effective. For instance, “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law” depicts the oppression and suffering that Rich wants to make her audience aware of. She uses craft and technique to render the poem’s subject in a powerful and memorable way. In a line like “each morning’s grit blowing into her eyes,” Rich harnesses the power of meter (the trochee in “blowing” emphasizes the force of the “grit”) and figurative language to render profound despair. Furthermore, as in later poems like “Planetarium” and “Diving into the Wreck,” she offers a positive, albeit ambiguous, resolution by indicating the possibility for overcoming oppression and suffering. Of course the possibility has much to do with Rich’s feminist politics. An audience that is resistant to feminism may be turned off by these poems, but at least Rich is attempting to say something to the audience, to spark some kind of conversation. The later poems also demonstrate how she can use craft and technique without having to don the asbestos gloves and shape the “well-wrought urn.”