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You are here: Home / Writing / Adrienne Rich Is Dead

Adrienne Rich Is Dead

March 30th, 2012 by Sallie Bingham in Writing 1 Comment

Adrienne Rich

The poet whose life and work meant so much to so many of us from the early 1960’s is dead at the age of 82. The New York Times, according her the respect she so richly deserves, ran her obituary on the front page on March 29th. Adrienne won her way to our regard.

In my heart, she has a special place because of some curious connections: she was at Radcliffe a few years before me, in the wretched fifties, and came out of that experience with formal training, an early marriage, and three sons. Her first poems, like my first stories, were exquisite, controlled, conventional, reflecting the rules we both learned in those Harvard writing classes where we were often the only “girls.”

I’m sorry the Times chose to quote, in full, a poem from one of her early collections, rather than the extraordinary poems of her coming of age in the late sixties. Her collected works sold 800 thousand copies across the course of her lifetime, her valiant publisher, W.W. Norton, keeping her in print all that time.

In my heart, she has a special place because of some curious connections: she was at Radcliffe a few years before me, in the wretched fifties, and came out of that experience with formal training, an early marriage, and three sons.

In addition to our shared early training in technique and patience, and our shared decision to thrust such training aside, we shared a curious fact from our past. Adrienne’s grandfather was sent to the military school in Asheville, North Carolina, run by generations of my Bingham male ancestors, a cruel place for a boy who must have been the only Jew, with its rigid discipline and military marches and a headmaster, my great-grandfather, who laid on the whip. Yet Adrienne, on one of the unfortunately rare occasions when we met, wore pinned to her dress the little gold rifle insignia her grandfather had won at the Bingham school. We both learned the hard lessons of adversity, as perhaps he did, although ours were learned in the stifling conventions of East Coast intellectual life, which underlined and underpinned the constrictions of women’s lives.

Her poems have lighted my life, as they have many others’, especially “Diving into the Wreck” which I have turned to in moments of despair: We are the ones who, on diving into the hold of the sunken ship of our pasts, return, bearing, “a knife, a camera, a book of myths in which our names do not appear.”

All of us who learned so much, and grew so tall, during the years when Adrienne was with us owe her our love and our profound gratitude.

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In Writing The New York Times Adrienne Rich Radcliffe W.W. Norton RIP

A long and fruitful career as a writer began in 1960 with the publication of Sallie Bingham's novel, After Such Knowledge. This was followed by 15 collections of short stories in addition to novels, memoirs and plays, as well as the 2020 biography The Silver Swan: In Search of Doris Duke.

Her latest book, Taken by the Shawnee, is a work of historical fiction published by Turtle Point Press in June of 2024. Her previous memoir, Little Brother, was published by Sarabande Books in 2022. Her short story, "What I Learned From Fat Annie" won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize in 2023 and the story "How Daddy Lost His Ear," from her forthcoming short story collection How Daddy Lost His Ear and Other Stories (September 23, 2025), received second prize in the 2023 Sean O’Faolain Short Story Competition.

She is an active and involved feminist, working for women’s empowerment, who founded the Kentucky Foundation for Women, which gives grants to Kentucky artists and writers who are feminists, The Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture at Duke University, and the Women’s Project and Productions in New York City. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Sallie's complete biography is available here.

Comments

  1. Thomas Lipscomb on Facebook says

    March 30th, 2012 at 11:33 am

    And she lived one hell of a life… Millay would have been proud of her “lovely light.”

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Taken By The Shawnee

Taken By The Shawnee

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Sallie Bingham introduces and reads from her latest work, Taken by the Shawnee.
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