Surely one of the highlights of my involvement with the Writers House Fellows program--which has brought three eminent writers to the cottage at 3805 Locust Walk each year since 1999--was the visit in April 2005 of Adrienne Rich. She gave a wonderful reading and we had a terrific interview-style conversation the next morning. What stunned and moved me most was her very positive reaction to us and her praise of the Writers House and the students and even of me. Her response was everything we'd hope for when we experimentally created the Writers House in the first place--and more. Of the new poems (from School among the Ruins) she read for us, I was most taken by a short poem called "Wait." Here is an mp3 of Rich reading the poem, and here is her 34-second introduction of it.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Adrienne Rich, "quite struck dumb"
Surely one of the highlights of my involvement with the Writers House Fellows program--which has brought three eminent writers to the cottage at 3805 Locust Walk each year since 1999--was the visit in April 2005 of Adrienne Rich. She gave a wonderful reading and we had a terrific interview-style conversation the next morning. What stunned and moved me most was her very positive reaction to us and her praise of the Writers House and the students and even of me. Her response was everything we'd hope for when we experimentally created the Writers House in the first place--and more. Of the new poems (from School among the Ruins) she read for us, I was most taken by a short poem called "Wait." Here is an mp3 of Rich reading the poem, and here is her 34-second introduction of it.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
