020: Diving into the Wreck

Adrienne Rich and the search for the unadulterated self

During the holiday, in addition to watching Gossip Girl, New Girl, The Mindy Project, Home for Christmas (Norwegian), The Princess Switch, The Princess Switch: Switched Again, sundry and other Netflix rom/coms, The 100 (yikes!), Letterkenney, season 9, and part of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina season 4, I read Hilary Holladay’s new biography, The Power of Adrienne Rich.

I first read Adrienne Rich during the poetry-reading years when I worked at Sanborn Library at Dartmouth in the mid-90s. I can picture the Baker Library stack from which I pulled an early, if not original copy of Diving into the Wreck: Poems 1971 - 1972, and I remember what exactly what it was like to be pulled down into its deeps:

Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

To say that the poem is the original ‘deep dive’ just shows you how o…