"An Atlas of the Difficult World": Adrienne Rich's Countermonument

Abstract

want to consider in this essay how Adrienne Rich has used poetic figuration of monuments to envision her subjects and readers as active contributors to contemporary American national identity. Since the 1980s, Rich has applied the core feminist concerns of her work to the lives of a range of men and women across geographic, ethnic, and religious boundaries. Rich's poetry of testimony to these lives-especially those marked by dislocation and violence-has attempted to be politically instrumental, spurring action both among those who are represented in her work and among her readers. The force of this poetry, Cynthia Hogue has argued, lies in Rich's power to connect her readers and subjects across the boundary of the text: transporting the reader from outside to inside the poem, [Rich's] poem's import is potentially translated from inside to outside the textual frame (Subject 414). These crossover effects are particularly suited to Rich's recent interest in national identity, which as she sees it is created at the juncture of the history of a place and the social and political concerns of a given moment. To produce these effects on public selfunderstanding in a way that transcends the textual frame, Rich often turns to inspirations outside of textual forms, including photography, painting, and, most prominently, monuments. By taking the monument as her aesthetic model, Rich exposes herself to charges