Adrienne Rich and W.S. Merwin

Poet W.S. Merwin wrote "Ogres" especially for the evening "Poems Not Fit For the White House" at the Lincoln Center, NYC, February 17, 2003. Ogres All night waking to the sound of light rain falling softly through the leaves in the quiet valley below the window and to Paula lying here asleep beside me and to the murmur beside the bed of the dogs' snoring like small waves coming ashore I am amazed at the fortune of this moment in the whole of the dark this unspoken favor while it is with us this breathing peace and then I think of the frauds in office at this instant devising their massacres in my name what part of me could they have come from were they made of my loathing itself and dredged from the bitter depths of my shame

In a world of violence, inequality and moral chaos, Adrienne Rich's voice will be neither silent nor content

-Heidi Benson, Chronicle Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 29, 2005

The terror attacks were still unimaginable when Adrienne Rich wrote a prescient poem called "The School Among the Ruins."

During that now seemingly innocent summer of 2001, Rich had been reading accounts of "civilian agonies" in Sarajevo, Baghdad, Bethlehem, Kabul -- including Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish on the Beirut bombing of 1982. With every page, her unease grew.

"We here could not expect to feel invulnerable forever," she remembers thinking. That thought became a catalyst for the poem crowning her new collection, "The School Among the Ruins: Poems 2000-2004."

The volume has won this year's National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.

Rich cited another catalyst for "The School Among the Ruins" in an e-mail interview from her Santa Cruz home -- the school, in Brooklyn, where her son teaches.

"I knew his love for the school, for those children," she said.

Set during a nonspecific wartime in which children and their teachers are hostages to horror, the poem includes these lines:

A morning breaks without bread or fresh-poured milk/

parents or lesson plans/

diarrhea first question of the day/

children shivering it's September/

Second question: where is my mother?/

One: I don't know where your mother/

is Two: I don't know/

why they are trying to hurt us/

Three: or the latitude and longitude/

of their hatred Four: I don't know if we/

hate them as much I think there's more toilet paper/

in the supply closet I'm going to break it open

In choosing this as the title poem of her newest collection, Rich meant it "in a larger metaphoric sense -- art as a school of the imagination in a world of violence and moral chaos."

In making the poem, much work went into avoiding sentimentality, above all, and selecting "just enough" concrete detail; it went through many revisions.

Rich, 76, is known for her politically engaged work -- passionate on the subjects of justice, civil rights and feminism. Over 40 years, she has published more than 20 books of poetry and essays. Her many awards include a MacArthur award, the Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award and a Bollingen Prize in American Poetry.

Accepting the National Book Critics Circle award March 18 in New York, Rich thanked "the movements and activists which have educated and fired me throughout my life."

Thursday night in San Francisco, Rich will draw from "The School Among the Ruins" when she joins poet W.S. Merwin for a reading at the First Unitarian Universalist Center.

The event celebrates Merwin's new collection, "Migrations: New & Selected Poems." It also honors Rich and Merwin's "old and continuing friendship in poetry," she said.

Rich and Merwin met in Boston in the late '50s, "probably through Robert Lowell," she said.

Merwin's first book had been published in the Yale Younger Poets series in 1954. The previous year, W.H. Auden had selected Rich's first book for the same honor.

"I was living in Cambridge, married, with three small children. I'd go over on an afternoon and we'd talk about poems," she said. "Both of us were going through changes in our work."

They corresponded, sharing poems even while Merwin lived abroad. "Though we'd both taken part in various poetry readings against the Vietnam War," she recalled, "I was increasingly involved with the political movements of the '60s."

It's fitting, then, that Rich called her favorites of Merwin's poems those from that era. She admires "a certain voice in them perhaps." His poem, "Ash," is "one of the most devastating, haunting poems I know, a wonderful example of what a political poem can be."

The Thursday reading will benefit Merwin's publisher, Copper Canyon Press -- "one of the treasures of our culture of resistance," said Rich.

So much of America's great literature, especially poetry, has been published by small, independent presses, Rich marveled. "And we have two distinguished ones on the West Coast -- Copper Canyon and City Lights."

Back in 1997, Rich made headlines when she refused the National Medal for the Arts on moral grounds.

She told a Chronicle reporter at the time, "Where growing numbers of people are being marginalized, impoverished, scapegoated and beleaguered, I don't feel I can accept an award from the government that is pursuing these policies."

Among the artists who had previously refused the honor were author Wallace Stegner and composer Stephen Sondheim.

In letters to both then-President Bill Clinton and NEA Chairwoman Jane Alexander, Rich wrote: "The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored."

In her e-mail interview last week, she called herself a socialist. "For me, socialism represents moral value -- the dignity and human rights of all citizens," she said. That is, the resources of a society should be shared and the wealth redistributed as widely as possible.

Her convictions have not changed.

Last week she also said she believes that the Sept. 11 disaster has been used "to crack down on dissent, on immigrants and foreigners and activists, on libraries and school textbooks -- to diffuse a climate of anxiety, ignorance and fear. To make war, not social good, the national goal."

And how has the culture changed since 9/11?

"Horribly for the worse," she said. " 'Market' values have become the sole measure of anything and everything.

"Oppositional voices have less and less space. Poverty -- which I think of as an index to the culture, an indefensible phenomenon in any developed nation, certainly the wealthiest in the world -- is much worse, and will go on worsening."

What advice -- and what warnings -- does she offer younger poets?

"If you are troubled by the cruelty and violence and lovelessness you see around you," Rich said, "if you want to live in your time and not in some Hollywood or videogame fantasy, if you've seen people around you pushed around or crushed ...

"If you love language and see it being betrayed, if you feel a huge gap between what you're told is going on and what you actually see and feel on your nerves -- then this is the material of your art, there's no escaping it.

"The question then is, how do you make enduring beauty and form out of such materials?

"And that will be the question of a lifetime."

E-mail Heidi Benson at hbenson@sfchronicle.com.