The Fact of a Doorframe: Poems 1950-2001

by Adrienne Rich

Overview

A reissue of the classic Adrienne Rich selection, revised and expanded to cover the entirety of her career, with a new Introduction.

The Fact of a Doorframe is the ideal introduction to Rich's opus, from her formative lyricism in A Change of Word (1951), to the groundbreaking poems of Diving into the Wreck (1973), to the searching voice of Fox (2001).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393323955
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/17/2002
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	344
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) was an award-winning poet, influential essayist, radical feminist, and major public intellectual of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She wrote two dozen volumes of poetry, including the National Book Award–winning Diving into the Wreck, and more than a half-dozen of prose.

Table of Contents

	Foreword	xv
	from A Change of World (1951)
	Storm Warnings	3
	Aunt Jennifer's Tigers	4
	Boundary	4
	At a Bach Concert	5
	from The Diamond Cutters (1955)
	Ideal Landscape	9
	Living in Sin	9
	The Snow Queen	10
	Letter from the Land of Sinners	11
	from Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963)
	from Morning-Glory to Petersburg	15
	The Knight	16
	Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law	17
	Antinous: The Diaries	21
	Peeling Onions	22
	The Roofwalker	23
	Prospective Immigrants Please Note	24
	From Necessities of Life (1966)
	Necessities of Life	29
	In the Woods	31
	The Trees	33
	Like This Together	34
	Night-Pieces: For a Child	36
	"I Am in Danger--Sir--"	38
	Mourning Picture	39
	The Knot	40
	Focus	41
	From Leaflets (1969)
	Orion	45
	In the Evening	46
	The Demon Lover	47
	Jerusalem	50
	Night Watch	52
	For a Russian Poet	53
	Abnegation	55
	Implosions	56
	On Edges	57
	Leaflets	58
	from Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib	63
	7/12/68 The clouds are electric in this university	63
	7/14/68: i In Central Park we talked of our own cowardice	63
	7/14/68: ii Did you think I was talking about my life?	64
	7/16/68: i Blacked-out on a wagon, part of my life cut out forever--	64
	7/16/68: ii When they mow the fields, I see the world reformed	65
	7/26/68: i Last night you wrote on the wall: Revolution is poetry	65
	8/1/68 The order of the small town on the riverbank	66
	8/4/68 If these are letters, they will have to be misread	66
	8/8/68: i From here on, all of us will be living	67
	8/8/68: ii A piece of thread ripped-out from a fierce design	67
	from The Will to Change (1971)
	November 1968	71
	Study of History	72
	Planetarium	73
	The Burning of Paper Instead of Children	75
	I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus	78
	Letters: March 1969	79
	The Stelae	83
	A Valediction Forbidding Mourning	84
	from Shooting Script	85
	from Diving into the Wreck (1973)
	Trying to Talk with a Man	93
	When We Dead Awaken	94
	From the Prison House	96
	The Mirror in Which Two Are Seen as One	97
	Dialogue	100
	Diving into the Wreck	101
	Song	104
	The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood at Last as a Sexual Message	105
	Rape	105
	Burning Oneself In	107
	From a Survivor	108
	August	109
	Uncollected Poems (1950-1974)
	The Prisoners	113
	At the Jewish New Year	113
	Dien Bien Phu	115
	Re-forming the Crystal	116
	White Night	118
	from an Old House in America	119
	The Fact of a Doorframe	131
	From The Dream of a Common Language (1978)
	Power	135
	Hunger	136
	Cartographies of Silence	138
	Twenty-One Love Poems	143
	A Woman Dead in Her Forties	154
	Natural Resources	160
	from A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981)
	Integrity	171
	For Memory	173
	For Ethel Rosenberg	174
	Grandmothers	179
	The Spirit of Place	181
	Frame	187
	from Your Native Land, Your Life (1986)
	For the Record	193
	Virginia 1906	194
	For an Occupant	196
	North American Time	197
	Blue Rock	201
	from Contradictions: Tracking Poems	203
1.	Look: this is January	203
2.	Heart of cold	204
3.	My mouth hovers	204
6.	Dear Adrienne: I'm calling you up tonight	205
7.	Dear Adrienne, I feel signified by pain	205
10.	Night over the great and the little worlds	206
11.	I came out of the hospital	206
12.	Violence as purification	207
14.	Lately in my dreams	207
15.	You who think I find words for everything	208
18.	The problem, unstated till now	208
20.	The tobacco fields lie fallow	209
22.	In a bald skull sits our friend	209
23.	You know the Government must have pushed them	210
26.	You: air-driven reft	210
27.	The Tolstoyans	211
29.	You who think I find words for everything	211
	from Time's Power (1989)
	In a Classroom	215
	The Novel	215
	Children Playing Checkers at the Edge of the Forest	216
	The Desert as Garden of Paradise	217
	Delta	224
	Dreamwood	224
	Harpers Ferry	225
	From An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991)
	from An Atlas of the Difficult World	233
I	A dark woman, head bent	233
II	Here is a map of our country	235
IV	Late summers, early autumns	236
V	Catch if you can your country's moment	237
VII	(The dream-site)	239
VIII	He thought there would be a limit	239
IX	On this earth, in this life	241
X	Soledad. = f. Solitude, loneliness	242
XI	One night on Monterey Bay	243
XIII	(Dedications)	245
	That Mouth	247
	Marghanita	247
	Tattered Kaddish	249
	Final Notations	250
	from Dark Fields of the Republic (1995)
	What Kind of Times Are These	253
	In Those Years	253
	Calle Vision	254
	Then or Now	261
	Food Packages: 1947	261
	Innocence: 1945	261
	Sunset, December, 1993	262
	Deportations	263
	And Now	264
	Late Ghazal	264
	from Inscriptions	265
1	comrade	265
2	movement	266
4	history	267
6	edgelit	268
	From Midnight Salvage (1999)
	For an Anniversary	275
	Midnight Salvage	275
	Char	280
	Letters to a Young Poet	282
	Camino Real	286
	Seven Skins	288
	Rusted Legacy	292
	from Fox (2001)
	Veterans Day	297
	Architect	302
	Fox	303
	Fire	304
	Noctilucent Clouds	305
	If Your Name Is on the List	306
	1999	307
	Four Short Poems	308
1	(driving home from Robin Blaser's reading)	308
2	We're not yet out of the everglades	308
3	Beethoven's "Appassionata" played	309
4	From the new crudities, from the old	309
	Ends of the Earth	310
	Notes	311
	Index	319

Editorial Reviews

Rich's poems,volume after volume,have been the makings of one of the authentic,unpredictable,urgent,essential voices of our time.

W. S. Merwin

[H]er dialectic fire produces poems of transcendent beauty.

New York Times Book Review

Adrienne Rich is the Blake of American letters.

Nadine Gordimer