Adrienne Rich, Poet Of Honor
by Sylvia Weinstein (November 1997)

Something unusual has happened. For the first time in history, a poet, Ms. Adrienne Rich, has turned down the National Medal for the Arts as a protest. She was disturbed by the widening gap between those who have wealth and power and those who do not.

Ms. Rich is 68 years old and has published more than 15 volumes of poetry since 1951. Her most recent, “Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995,” is published by W. W. Norton.

Jane Alexander, the chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts, said of her, “Ms. Rich is eminently qualified to receive this distinguished award from President Clinton.” Ms. Rich evidently didn’t think Clinton was qualified to give it.

She said, “I am not against government in general, but I am against a government where so much power is concentrated in so few hands.”

Ms. Rich said her decision “was not difficult; it was a quick response. I felt I cannot be used this way.... The very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.”

She continued, “Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.” You’ve got to love a woman like Adrienne Rich.

The ruling class of this country simply does not like art. Unless they own it and can hang it in their drawing rooms. But the artist has to die poor and undernourished in order to be declared an artist later.

We have on the Statue of Liberty a great poem by another great poet, Emma Lazarus. It’s from her sonnet, “The New Colossus,” and it reads:

Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:

I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

The Statue of Liberty stands about 1.6 miles from Manhattan, where the poor wait in long lines outside soup kitchens, and the homeless sleep out in the open, cold weather or hot.

It is no wonder that the imperialist powers who own the politicians are now campaigning to remove Emma Lazarus’s poem from the statue. That compassionate welcome stands for everything they are against. What would they replace those wonderful words with?

I think if the ruling rich got together they would write something like this:

Give me your oil fields, your rivers and your mines, also your rain forests

Tell the huddled masses to forget breathing free air

We will send you land mines, military supplies

to keep your wretched refuse from rebelling.

Send us your ex-military dictators, your rich and fashionable.

We will send you factories with three-tiered low wages to the tempest-tossed homeless, so overburdened they won’t try to overthrow us.

Now that’s the kind of poetry the capitalist class supports.

I’m glad there are poets such as Adrienne Rich. She speaks for the multitude; the rich speak for themselves. She speaks for me and you! —November 1997

 

 

FIGHTBACK! A Collection of Socialist Essays
By Sylvia Weinstein

Socialist Viewpoint Publishing Association
ISBN: 0-9763570-0-3    
360 pp.

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