Ange Mlinko and Adrienne Rich

 QUITE A WHILE BACK--February 2013, going by the print edition date--Ange Mlinko published in The Nation a review of Adrienne Rich's final collection (Rich had died the previous March) and suggested that Rich's standing among younger poets had fallen and was likely to fall further.

JANUARY 30, 2013

Diagram This: On Adrienne Rich

A new collection of Adrienne Rich’s poems does not show her at her best.

ANGE MLINKO

It seemed to me that Mlinko was right (see Loads of Learned Lumber for 3/16/2013), so I was struck by Mlinko beginning a recent review in London Review of Books of a new biography of Rich and a new edition of Of Woman Born by saying "Adrienne Rich's poems speak so strongly to the current zeitgeist [...] that's is astounding to realize they were written twenty, forty, fifty years ago [...]".  The discourses of the Occupy, #MeToo, and Black Lives Matter movements are all close to Rich's wavelength, Mlinko notes. "Her essays employ an argot that contemporary opinion pieces might have cribbed from," she writes.

This got my attention. Has Mlinko changed her mind about Adrienne Rich?

The word "argot" made me suspect that Mlinko had not really changed her mind. Rich may have been right on any number of issues, but she was better at being right than she was at making poems--at least I think that is where Mlinko is coming down. "But one doesn't doesn't read Rich for la comédie humaine, stylistic sprezzatura, or pleasure of any sort--unless one takes pleasure in moral indignation, which Lionel Trilling once claimed was a distinct feature of the American middle-class liberal," Mlinko writes.

It has long seemed to me that Rich is a good poet for people who do not otherwise like poetry much. If you do like poetry, her poems do not provide the kind of pleasures you have come to expect. They do take up important topics, though, and take a forward-leaning progressive stance. It did not seem to me or (I guess) Ange Mlinko in 2013 that those choices boded well for Rich's future reputation, but at this point, her reputation may be doing fine.