"Begin with the material": Adrienne Rich's Nomadic Poetics

Abstract:This article explores how Adrienne Rich's poetic thinking intersects with the recently emerged new materialist and posthumanist philosophies, offering a non-reductive understanding of the embodied self as enmeshed in the nature-culture continuum, corporeal vulnerability as relational, and history as registered in the body. It argues that Rich developed a nomadic poetics: a mode of exploratory writing, which searches for "transformative meaning on the shoreline of what can now be thought or said" (Poetry and Social Commitment 2007), reorients the relationship between the self and others, and complicates the idea of materiality and newness. To trace how Rich's poetics was evolving over time, it looks both at her earlier theorizing on mind-matter entanglements and her later and lesser-known poem "Letters Censored / Shredded / Returned to Sender / or Judged Unfit to Send" (2005) published as part of Telephone Ringing in the Labyrinth.