A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008 - Hardcover

Rich, Adrienne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393070069 ISBN 13: 9780393070064

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009

Synopsis

One of America’s most distinguished poets explores the complex relationship between art and social justice.

Over more than three decades Adrienne Rich’s essays have been praised for their lucidity, courage, and range of concerns. In A Human Eye, Rich examines a diverse selection of writings and their place in past and present social disorders and transformations. Beyond literary theories, she explores from many angles how the arts of language have acted on and been shaped by their creators’ worlds.This powerful new collection includes a stirring response to the anthology Iraqi Poetry Today, a critique of three classic socialist manifestos, and a rereading of The Dead Lecturer, an early volume of poems by LeRoi Jones. Rich engages the impulse to make art that both impels toward and interacts with social change, a theme she also traces through the letters of poets Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, gay and lesbian politics and poetry, and influential texts on Zionism and the Jewish diaspora.

About this title

About the Author:

Widely read, widely anthologized, widely interviewed, and widely taught, Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was for decades among the most influential writers of the feminist movement and one of the best-known American public intellectuals. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry and more than a half-dozen of prose. Her constellation of honors includes two National Book Awards, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, and a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation. Ms. Rich’s volumes of poetry include The Dream of a Common Language, A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far, An Atlas of the Difficult World, The School Among the Ruins, and Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth. Her prose includes the essay collections On Lies, Secrets, and Silence; Blood, Bread, and Poetry; an influential essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” and the nonfiction book Of Woman Born, which examines the institution of motherhood as a socio-historic construct. In 2010, she was honored with The Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry's Lifetime Recognition Award.

From Booklist:

Humanitarian poet Rich is a live-wire essayist, taking measure here of what she describes as a “permeable membrane between art and society.” The title of her latest collection is from Karl Marx: “The eye has become a human eye only when its object has become a human, social object.” And it is this human connection and vision that Rich searches for in the literature she discusses. Strong writing, Rich believes, is about “how we are with each other,” and she finds this encompassing theme in the work of Muriel Rukeyser, whom Rich admires for her “poetics of historical sensibility”; James Baldwin, who was “uncanny” in his prescience; and June Jordan, who believed humor and pleasure are essential to social change. Rich deep-reads poetry written in the shadow of AIDS and during tyranny and war in Iraq, and argues that we must all be “resistant to dogma.” For all Rich’s shepherding us toward compassion and solidarity with those who suffer violence and injustice, she never ceases to praise the mystery intrinsic to poetry and art. --Donna Seaman

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0393070069
• ISBN 13: 9780393070064
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208