R: Adrienne Rich

What Kind Of Times Are These

I think I was always going to choose Adrienne Rich for this one (I didn’t particularly feel like getting down into the Cavalier Libertine mud with the Earl of Rochester) but I’ve been vacillating wildly about which version of Adrienne Rich I like best. I love her amazing sonnet sequence “21 Love Poems”, which is some of the 20^th Century’s best love poetry, and incidentally also contains one of my favourite lines about bookshelves ever, which is that every bookshelf contains the “ghosts” of “centuries of books unwritten piled behind…men who would not, women who could not speak to our life”. You can read them all here, they’re ace: Adrienne Rich – Twenty-One Love Poems | Genius

But Rich is also a brilliant political writer. As I think about it, she probably wouldn’t appreciate me making the distinction, because one of her core approaches as a poet is that the personal is political and vice versa. Anyway, one of my favourites is this one, which is absolutely about that fusing of the personal with the political, and about how to exist in Interesting Times.

You can read it here: What Kind of Times Are These | The Poetry Foundation

What Kind Of Times Are These

I’m going to use this space to discuss a key contextual way in – this poem was written in 1991 as a response to a poem called “To Those Who Follow In Our Wake” by the great antifascist exile poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht. You can read Brecht’s poem, and a really nice commentary of it, here: https://harpers.org/2008/01/brecht-to-those-who-follow-in-our-wake/

I like the idea that Brecht, born in 1898, reached down the generations to speak to those who would come after the “times” that he lived in, and I like the idea that Rich, born in 1929, responds to it directly as a member of that following generation. I think the line that really resonates in the original Brecht poem, and the one that Rich zooms in on, is “What times are these, in which/A conversation about trees is almost a crime/For in doing so we maintain our silence about so much wrongdoing!” Oof. Definitely a relatable line in the age of social media and in the current climate of ongoing genocide in which the West’s own involvement has entirely been based around manufacturing and maintaining silence around its complicity.

It's a question for anyone with a conscience, isn’t it? And it’s a question with no easy answer. In light of the genocide in Gaza, the outrages of Trumpism, the social murder of austerity and slow, deliberate freefall into fascism in this country, the disaster of climate change, how can I have written a total of 60,000 words and counting on Substack since January about *poetry*? How can we post pictures on social media, watch TV, eat nice meals, go about our normal lives, in the knowledge of “so much wrongdoing”?

The “old books”, Brecht says, teach us that it’s wise to “retreat from the strife of the world”, to “make your way without violence” – but is it wise? The impulse is understandable, desirable even, but “I cannot heed this”, Brecht says. In the third part, he seems to have accepted that this is not the way to defeat evil. He doesn’t do this triumphantly, or with any particular appetite for violence, but in the knowledge that “We who wished to lay the foundations for gentleness/Could not ourselves be gentle.” That “could” is interesting – is it saying that responding to violence with violence is a failure, or is he saying the opposite, that violence is now a moral imperative if we want gentleness after? Well, his enemy was fascism, so I think it’s the second one, and he begs “leniency” from those of us in future generations who *can* live in a time where gentleness might be possible. Well, we’ll let you know when that is, Brecht.

Anyway – here’s someone else with a conscience responding to this question about ‘our times’ and how to exist in them.

There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled
this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

Here is Rich talking about the trees. But it seems at first that she’s in sympathy with Brecht. For Brecht, “the trees” felt like his shorthand for trivialities, the business of ordinary life but perhaps even the business of higher things like nature, art and beauty, too - as things that distracted from the “real” business of resistance to tyranny. In this first stanza, Rich can’t talk about the trees without mentioning their proximity to the “old revolutionary road” and a “meeting-house”. This is the context in which we talk about the trees – they point the way to a place where that “real” business can happen.

I absolutely love the image of “picking mushrooms at the edge of dread.” The meeting-house is a place of safety from the world – so it’s both the place where we have the “real” conversations but also the place where we can “retreat from the strife of the world”. But she’s not picking *flowers* there, is she? Mushrooms themselves are a kind of manifestation of decay and decomposition – they are the flowers of a dark time. Perhaps Rich means here that even if you can find a retreat, it’s not that you can’t inhabit it because you *shouldn’t*, it’s that you can’t inhabit it because it’s not possible to. You can write, you can make art, you can gather joy, but it will still be a product of the broken world you inhabit.

I also like how she wakes the reader up – “this isn’t a Russian poem” – i.e. this is not a poem where you can experience radical resistance to tyranny vicariously as something that exclusively happens elsewhere. I think this part is important. Yes, the Brecht poem is, in many ways, the archetypal exile poem. It’s a poem about survivor guilt as much as about moral imperative. Rich, too, is aware that she exists outside the epicentre of the world’s worst suffering. But she urges us not to otherise that suffering, and to see it as something on a continuum that does, or will soon, include you and your life too. Again, this line hits hard for me at the moment – “our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,/its own ways of making people disappear.” Quite. Think ICE. Think Yarl’s Wood. Think Yvette Cooper’s new bill designating the non-violent Palestine Action a terror group.

I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

Who is the ‘you’ here? The reader? Is this place the speaker’s, and hers alone? Why does it have to be secret? It has to be secret because it’s a place of resistance, but also because it’s a place for private retreat.

Look how beautiful the short nature description is here: ‘dark mesh’, ‘unmarked strip of light’. And look again at how the beauty is suffused with death and decay – the crossroads is ’ghost-ridden’ and there’s that mould again that links to the mushrooms from earlier. And who is it who wants to ‘buy it, sell it, make it disappear’? On one level, it’s the forces of oppression who would remove any sanctuary or any seat of resistance. On another, it’s the faceless capitalist machine, who would want to turn a place of nature and sanctuary into just another commodity.

But could it even be about the likes of Brecht himself? Is this line a reprimand to him for writing the line about the trees? Is this landscape also standing as much for a mental state as it is for a physical one? Brecht and other fellow radicals and resisters may want to ‘make it disappear’ because it’s too cosy, too safe? So “I won’t tell you where the place is” even if you’re an ally, not only because it might compromise the place, but also because *you* might remove it yourself?

And I won't tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it's necessary
to talk about trees.

What are we to make of this ending? I think it hinges on who the ‘you’ is. I think the most straightforward interpretation is that she’s doing what Brecht did in his poem, and talking to a generalised ‘you’ who stands outside of ‘the times’. It feels almost like another rebuke, somehow, doesn’t it? Or if not a rebuke then a sad resignation. If things like solidarity and radicalism are important, this ending seems to say, then Brecht may be wrong to suggest that ‘talking about trees’ is an indulgence – actually, it’s the way to engage with ourselves and with each other before we go on to talking about the direct stuff. It’s the only way, because otherwise we won’t listen to each other at all.

I think Rich is reaching for something about what it means to be politically engaged, either with the people on our ‘side’ or the people who are not, or the people who consider themselves to be beyond ‘sides’. She’s reaching for a different conclusion to Brecht, who seemed to land in a more radical, uncompromising space, albeit reluctantly. Unlike Brecht, I don’t think she’s necessarily making a comment about the limits (or not) of radicalism, but she does seem to be advocating for a way of living ‘in the times’ that goes beyond hardening oneself entirely. If Brecht’s vision was only of a *future* world where we could ‘talk about the trees’ again, Rich seems to be trying to advocate for the importance of at least trying to live in both worlds - *either* because ‘talking about the trees’ - seeking out somewhere safe, living ordinarily, considering art and nature - is a way to retain our humanity *or* because it’s the way to ethically move together into a space where people can entertain harder discussions around radicalism and resistance.