Comparing the Poetry of Adrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood
Tracking Poems,” and “North American Time.” In the collection titled Selected Poems II, Margaret Atwood undertakes a similar concern with “Two-Headed Poems,” “Notes Towards a Poem that Can Never be Written,” and “The Words Continue Their Journey,” among other selections. Both Rich and Atwood explore the role of language in creating, defining, and transforming personal worlds. In so doing, they inevitably address the place of poetry in modern life.
For Rich, being accountable for one’s words is the poet’s primary responsibility. She speaks of “verbal privilege” as the choice between choosing words and choosing to remain silent (198). Poetry may be “violent” and “arcane,” but it is also “hewn of the commonist living substance” (“The Fact of a Doorframe,” 131)-language, tinged with the desperate desire to communicate. Atwood describes language in “Two-Headed Poems” as “a disease of the mouth” (34) but also refers to humanity’s “hunger for verbs” (35)-the longing for language that will make true action possible. In “Notes Towards a Poem that Can Never Be Written,” Atwood demonstrates the poet’s compulsion to write about even that which is indescribable:
We make wreaths of adjectives for them,
we count them like beads,
we turn them into statistics & litanies
and into poems like this one. (71)
The poet’s role in society, then, is to bear witness (73). Rich believes that for the poet (and for humanity, for whom the poet speaks), to use language is a necessary burden; as she writes in “Inscriptions,” “I name it unsteady, slick, unworthy / and I go on [writing]” (269). The alternative, remaining silent, is unthinkable.
Rich asserts in “Cartographies of Silence” that silence is not absence; it contains the unexpressed true undercurrent of the world (140). The truth is there, whether or not it is liberated by the voice of the poet, but it is the poet’s responsibility to make it more accessible to humanity. Throughout Selected Poems II, Atwood introduces the concept of a truth that transcends language or even image. In “True Stories,” she introduces the idea that the truth is inutterable, not to be grasped except by reading between the lines:
The true story lies
among the other true stories,
a mess of colors, like jumbled clothing
thrown off or away,
� like
butcher’s discards. (58)
The truth is found in what we have disregarded as useless or too complex.
Furthermore, the truth seems at first to be untrustworthy, as Atwood indicates by her choice to break the line to read, “The true story lies.” One cannot expect to request the truth and have it presented simply; to find the truth requires “luck, a few good words / that still work, and the tide” (57). In “Landcrab II,” “You Begin,” and “She,” Atwood emphasizes that the poet should not employ thoughtless metaphors for easy identification. The crab is “no-one’s metaphor,” she writes, hinting that this creature’s world contains stories as valid and multiplicitous as any human world (60). In a similar vein, “She” describes a snake in terms of what it is not-“viciousness,” “whip or rope,” “phallus” (133)-and allows carefully chosen verbs to indicate the creature’s true nature: “do a transfusion,” “sees red,” “zeroes in” (133).
Atwood’s intent is to show that language can either hinder or enable humanity’s search for truth. Rich echoes this idea in “Cartographies of Silence” when she longs for
a poetry where this could happen
not as blank spaces or as words
stretched like a skin over meanings
but as silence falls at the end
of a night through which two people
have talked till dawn (141)
She goes on to imagine a poem that could “simply look you in the face / with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn / / till you, and I who long to make this thing, / were finally clarified together in its stare” (142). Atwood’s “You Begin” reminds the reader that a world is viewed through the lens of one’s own identity and that identity is based not on vocabulary (the ability to describe oneself) but on concrete certainties: “[T]his is what you will / come back to, this is your hand” (54).
Rich agrees in “North American Time” that the truth is so complex that there can be no uncomplicated images:
Suppose you want to write
of a woman braiding
another woman’s hair-
straight down, or with beads and shells
in three-strand plaits or corn-rows-
you had better know the thickness
the length the pattern
why she decides to braid her hair
what country it happens in
what else happens in that country (199)
The power of an image depends upon its context, because language alone cannot convey the complexity of the world’s true stories. Atwood laments the inefficacy of language in “Two-Headed Poems,” wishing for a different language that would be “so precise / and secret it was not even / a code, it was snow, / there could be no translation” (28). To manipulate language is the privilege and curse of the poet, who must “translat[e] pulsations / into images” (Rich 74) without simplifying them so far as to destroy them, as described in “Two-Headed Poems” when the twins’ hearts have been reduced to “flags” that “[a]nyone can understand” (28).
Atwood asserts that only love can “put blood / back in the language” (63). Both Atwood and Rich view human intimacy as the most important of the world’s stories and thus the most worthy of being translated into poetry. As Atwood puts it in “Two-Headed Poems”: “[W]ords, hearts, what’s the difference?” (25). Rich shows that poets can use language to reach out to other human beings as much as to capture that desire to reach out: “I wanted to choose words that even you / would have to be changed by” (56). Yet she acknowledges the difficulty of using “the oppressor’s language” to forge bonds between hearts (76); as she writes in “The Roofwalker,” “even my tools are the wrong ones” (24).
Rich describes a dream in which she is exposed to “transformational grammar” (207)-a language format that might allow her to accomplish things in poetry that known languages cannot. In “Five Poems for Grandmothers,” Atwood finds herself attempting to create a “charm” against her many fears using “nothing but paper; which is good / for exactly nothing” (15)-yet she proceeds nevertheless, knowing that any action is truer than inaction. Even if “there is no poem you can write about it” (71), the poet must embrace the desire to try. Atwood’s “Interlunar” urges humanity to engage with its inner darkness, “[s]omething of your own you can carry with you” that “is always available” and is more reliable than “the appearances of things” (121). Similarly, in “Contradictions: Tracking Poems,” Rich urges the reader-“you who love clear edges / more than anything”-to relinquish the need for definition and “watch the edges that blur” (212).
Rich and Atwood are both poets who are concerned with language, not just its inherent limitations but its misuse toward efforts of blind categorization. They urge us to stay in touch with our hunger for true stories but to be willing to discover these stories in the blurred edges and the unconscious darkness. Used with care, language can transform worlds.
