Robin Beckerexcerpt from The Poetics of Engagement
Adrienne Rich
The poem based on a historical figure or one which employs biographical detail must, of necessity, take up epistemic questions. Adrienne Rich, in Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998, animates a number of activists/artists and quotes from poets including Hart Crane, Osip Mandelstam, Charles Olsen, and George Oppen, "staging" poems that accommodate numerous speakers and perspectives. She quotes from Che Guevara and Karl Marx and Richard Nixon, making meaning through the selection and arrangement of arguments, confessions, statements. I single out a poem called "Modotti"--for the way Rich's diction, imagery, point of view and syntax make the gaps and uncertainties in our knowledge an essential aspect of any knowledge. Rich employs the second person to address Italian-born photographer and revolutionary Tina Modotti (1896-1942) throughout the poem. Composed in five eight-line stanzas, "Modotti" has a unifying elegance, enhanced with frequent, irregular line, phrasal, and word repetitions. Without knowing much about Tina Modotti, a reader feels the speaker bearing down on the elusive story of Modotti's art and life. Opening with noun phrases such as "footprints of light," "typewriter you made famous," "footsteps following you," Rich suggests that the clues to understanding any life are circumstantial, material, partial at best, and she concludes the opening stanza with two prescient lines:if this is where I must look for you
then this is where I'll find you.The listing of items--"streetlamp's wet lozenge," "curb plastered with newsprint," "headlines," "footsteps," "corridor"--continues into the second stanza, as Rich builds a case for Modotti's pursuit. But who (in addition to the poet) pursues her? And why? The verbs "look," "follow," and "find" appear repeatedly in the last two lines of each stanza, linking Rich's pursuit to the literal objects--"darkroom," "hideout," "manifestos,"--which the poet must study to piece together a narrative. References to the photographer's art ("sensitive paper," "blackened panes," "lightbulb in a scarred ceiling") play against and with the "detection" theme, and Rich alludes to a particular Modotti photograph by repeating the line "that typewriter you made famous" in stanzas one and four. By the last stanza, built entirely of prepositional phrases, Rich has created a compelling "investigation":
In the red wash of your darkroom
from your neighborhood of volcanoes
to the geranium nailed in a can
on the wall of your upstairs hideout
in the rush of breath a window
of revolution allowed you
on this jaundiced stair in this huge lashed eye
these
footsteps I'm following you withRich's restless listing and locating of things illustrate how syntax and meaning merge. I race with the speaker up the stairs to Modotti's darkroom, where "a window/of revolution"greets the pursuers. Finally, having navigated the twists and turns, we are still "cornered" by incomplete knowledge, are still "following." This engagement with Rich's fictional construction of Tina Modotti led me to further research; I suspect that others have been moved to do the same.
Robin Becker's fifth collection of poems, The Horse Fair (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), was a finalist for the 2000 Lambda Literary Award. She is Professor of English and Women's Studies at Pennsylvania State University and serves as Poetry Editor for The Women's Review of Books.
