Adrienne Rich's Deciphering Flame

Abstract:This article considers Adrienne Rich's layered use of metaphor and enthymeme in an effort to unfold the rhetorical turns Rich employed in her post-1980s poetry. Through her later poems and essays, Rich revealed the inequities marking her contemporary times, while providing a map for understanding one's own location in history—physical, emotional, political, geographical—as well as the need to build solidarity with others and to envision new structures and ways of being. Significantly, Rich didn't dictate to readers; rather, through increasingly frequent enthymemes, she invited them to (re)see and (re)consider the world around them, to become part of the meaning making process itself. This turn in Rich's later poetry ultimately marks her legacy as a citizen poet, one bent on providing the "deciphering flame" that illuminates the change that might emerge through collective effort.