Z Magazine

September 2005 Volume 18 Number 9

Book Review

the school among the ruins

by Adrienne Rich,

New York City, Norton, 2004, 114 pp.

Review by Gregg Mosson

Adrienne Rich’s confrontations with cultural, social, and political issues since the 1960s find few peers, so it is a refreshing, shocking, and oddly fortifying, to find the accomplished and well-anthologized Rich searching for new questions as well as answers in her latest book. In the school among the ruins—2004 National Book Critics Circle Award winner in poetry—Rich situates herself during a time when the “country I was born and lived in undergoes rapid and flagrant change,” and then explores this with the bravery of someone not reaching back for the tools she already has mastered. Rather, Rich tackles writing poetry in her latest by experimenting, experimenting in order to develop an efficacious approach to the current human crisis. While this book arises from ground cleared and prepared in her last two books, Midnight Salvage and Fox, it has found its most unfettered expression here. It is an expression that asks as its most fundamental question: how can a person live and write in a world being destroyed by war, corruption, and consumerism? 

That this “flagrant change” comes from a poem titled “Usonian Journals 2000” points to Rich’s reckoning with the U.S. landscape in the wake of the still-dubious 2000 U.S. presidential election. Rich’s book expands questions and answers about this in a fragmented, cubist landscape of partially photographed scenes and briefly overheard speech. “Usonian Journals” is the perfect poem to discuss Rich’s exploration of how to confront the world today. For this sequence of prose poetry—a rare for Rich—states through its prose form that Rich finds it impossible to write lyric poetry in this environment. Her poem then becomes a stage to see if she can. It becomes a stage to see if a “school”—an educational or poetical singing school —can arise from the ruins. If so, as in Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” it will have to arise from the depths of individual suffering and joy connected to the universal human experience. Rich writes: “As we left the dark publike restaurant the street—ordinary enough couple of blocks between a parking lot and an office complex—broke into spitting, popping sounds and sudden running. I held back against the wall, she beside me. Something happened then everything. A man’s voice screamed, then whined: a police siren starting up seeming miles away then right there. I didn’t see any blood. We ran in a different direction, she toward, I away from, the police.”

For Rich the world is only understandable within controlled interiors, in cave-like “dark” restaurants contrasted to an outside world that erupts to chaos. So, “[a]s we left the dark publike restaurant” blurs to “[s]omething happened then everything” of the street. The transition to vagueness of “then everything” mimics the perspective of someone overwhelmed by fear. The untrustworthy public space, “ordinary enough,” Rich reassures herself at first, breaks into hubbub, then to grammatically elliptical “sudden running” as sensation overwhelms precise perception. The “spitting, popping sounds” disrupt Rich—the poem’s protagonist—from continuing to order the world within conventional grammatical relationships. Rich the character in this poem no longer can rely on the quantifiable contemporary landscape of “office complex[es]” and “publike” faux atmospheres. An “office complex” is a word that modern readers understand of course; it is also faceless and beyond interpretation. An office complex reveals nothing about what occurs within. Its walls and windows are specific solely in their vacuity. Yet this specific vacuity offers Rich an anchor to hold on to, a surface comprehensibility that shatters before sound and action. This switch forces her into a position of having to choose a stance. It forces Rich out of the comfort of the consumer and corporate landscape with its easy-to-read, surface-level labels and non-committal anonymity. This incident details how the abstract landscape of the U.S. is solely surface and that this “like” landscape offers a false sense of comprehension in which people can easily hide and which in any second can shatter. 

As Rich flees the scene, she notes that “I didn’t see any blood,” implying that she might have overreacted. The action described above may not have been what it seemed. The jigsaw puzzle of appearance offers a plausible, but not final narrative. Rich’s fragmentary prose embodies this tension and frays at the edges of creating a total picture for the reader. 

The prose poetry of “Usonian Journals 2000” as a formal choice allows Rich to foreground the search for interpretation as the poem’s subject. It does so by moving between and across lyric, prosaic, spoken, and fractured language. It foregrounds the ability to use different modes of expression. Likewise, this form allows Rich to use the genre of the journal entry to foreground her stance—in this book—that lived experience is crucial to the search for meaningful answers. In this subtle way she glances back to Walt Whitman, a figure she wrestled with more fully in Midnight Salvage. In contrast to Whitman, Rich’s journal entries in “Usonian Journals” emphasize— more than Whitman’s present-tense “Song of Myself” for instance— that recollection within the tranquility of a notebook,or at a desk, is key to turning the chaos of emotion and incident into clarity, a clarity that is crucial for figuring out how to live. 

This search for clarity is at the heart “Usonian Journals 2000.” In the end, Rich notes that in order to restore her own sense of order she forsakes the social order and runs “away from, the police.”

The poem then moves to a meditation on how to live and write a public sphere transformed by the disembodied public communication of email, for instance, and the ubiquity of the cell phone. The cell phone, Rich notes, causes “[p]riv- ate urgencies made public, not collective, speaker within a bubble.” Rich then asks: “Could I just show what’s happening?” Juxtaposed to her own search is a U.S. culture where people (more than in past decades, she implies) use the verb “seem” to describe their perceptions and employ qualified rather than declarative sentences. “How interchangeable it could all get to seem,” Rich remarks to herself about the chaos of public life. 

Likewise, Rich notes that the speed of modern life blurs the individuality of people into a jumbled, surface seeming. Then she catches herself. “Could get to seem…the kind of phrase we use now, avoiding the verb to be.” Rich’s quest for clarity puts her at odds with today’s vague language of “seem,” “office complex,” and “publike.” There is a sense of loneliness in her latest book as well as deep questing passion. In this cultural atmosphere, Rich questions whether art is relevant, and even possible. At a minimum, Rich’s search for verbal integrity in detail and description is in direct contrast to the world of office complexes, reality television, and thematic restaurants. 

For Rich, throughout the school among the ruins, the artist and commercialized technology are waging a battle over language, what it can do, what it can mean. The section titled “Document Window” foregrounds language as a field in which one can see the inherent tension between technology and culture. The section’s title poses the question of whether the words that follow are part of a poetic window of perception, or a computerized space to be filled, printed-out, and filed away. The poem hinges toward both, and does so ironically, possibly in order to leave the question of Rich’s own unification of her work and art open. As Robert Frost said, “My object in living is to unite/My avocation and my vocation/As my two eyes make one in sight.” In the end, Rich’s search for clarity, meaning, and perception has her turning away from social engagement. 

Rich’s language bends and fractures even in order to capture and articulate the impact of new technologies today, which makes people sound “pitched fastforward commercial.” While Rich’s latest collection is not imagistically quotable, unlike her 1960’s-1970’s writing from The Will to Change or Diving Into the Wreck, in total it offers a stunning landscape.

Rich in “Usonian Journals 2000” uses assonance, consonance, and word selection to capture the way people speak in the American cultural norms of 21^st century. She writes:

“USonian speech. Men of the upwardly mobilizing class needing to sound boyish, an asset in all the newness of the new: upstart, startup, adventurist, pirate lad’s nasal bravado in the male vocal cords. Voices of girls and women screeking to an excitable edge of brightness. In an excessively powerful country, grown women sound like girls without authority or experience. Male, female voices alike pitched fastforward commercial, one timbre, tempo, intonation.”

Rich employs consonance and assonance to hold her lines together, while using prose poetry in a note-taking manner of a journal entry,. We see it above when she writes of someone “screeking to an excitable edge of brightness.” The sonic interplay of high notes “i” and “e” with hard “k,” “x” and “ght” documents contemporary speech tones and patterns. The concluding weaving sound of “timbre, temper, intonation” is less an onomatopoeia of overheard speech patterns, than verbal music and play. This phrase’s musically braided dance is made of “i” and “t” sounds that switch order with each word. So the “t-i” in “timbre” is followed by a “t-e” sound in “temper,” and then a reverse “i-t” sound in “intonation.” Here we see Rich’s struggling lyric drive peek through and enjoy itself in sound play, like a flower emerging in an alley overlooked by the surrounding urban chaos.

“Keeping my back up against unimportant walls I moved out of the range of confusion. Having seen nothing I could swear to I felt at peace with my own default.”

As Rich noted in Midnight Salvage, poetry today is “contraband” that must be snuck through border customs-officials into the utilitarian and consumer U.S. society. “Usonian Journals 2000” picks this theme up and concludes by saying that culture comes down to a battle of language being fought right now between governments, advertisers, and of course poets. Since this poem ends with an ironic speech, it is hard to say who Rich believes is winning. Her book raises more questions than answers and possibly does so as a way to spur readers into creating their own answers. Yet Rich does offer a few conclusions. As she states in “Usonian Journals”: “The fake road, its cruel deception, is what we have to abandon.”