Cheryl Strayed remembers Adrienne Rich

Originally published in 2013 for Scapegoats and Panaceas.

Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild and the acclaimed Dear Sugar column at The Rumpus, has come up in our endorsements before. Today, I want to recommend her for her brief, characteristically intimate, profile of Adrienne Rich in the New York Times Magazine, published back in December.

Strayed’s writing strikes a tone that is her own, different from that of the unequaled poet and feminist she commemorates here. But knowing what a profound role Rich’s writings played in Strayed’s personal and professional development (detailed, among other places, in the pages of Wild) adds another layer of complexity and enjoyment to reading her work.

The portrait of Rich herself is moving and insightful, in spite of its brevity. It turns on a meditation of the six words of Adrienne’s that stay with Strayed “like a brain tattoo”: We are, I am, you are.

For Strayed, these words are enough to convey that particular kind of connectivity that leaves nothing out:

“Indivisibility is classic Rich. She was a great connector of things: art to politics, love to rage, consciousness to action, society to self, power to wound, me to you, us to her.”

It’s a uniquely gratifying experience to witness one of my recent favorites write, with such admiration and respect, of another longstanding favorite. I agree not only with Strayed’s appraisal of Rich, but also with the sentiment she attributes to her:

“She believed in the power of art, not only its beauty and necessity but also the real, raw, actual power of it.”