{"id":8102,"date":"2012-03-29T09:13:22","date_gmt":"2012-03-29T16:13:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/cosmicvariance\/?p=8102"},"modified":"2012-03-29T09:13:22","modified_gmt":"2012-03-29T16:13:22","slug":"adrienne-rich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/29\/adrienne-rich\/","title":{"rendered":"Adrienne Rich"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/03\/29\/books\/adrienne-rich-feminist-poet-and-author-dies-at-82.html\">Adrienne Rich<\/a>, one of the leading American poets of the 20th century, died on Tuesday at the age of 82.  Anything you read about her will emphasize her identity as a feminist and a lesbian, which is perfectly appropriate, but don&#8217;t let it get in the way of the fact that she was an amazingly inventive and affecting poet.  She was also widely admired as a lecturer and essayist.  (And I can only imagine she would have cringed at the line in the NYT obit where it says she &#8220;burst genteelly onto the scene as a Radcliffe senior in the early 1950s.&#8221; Is bursting something one can do genteelly?)<\/p>\n<p>This is the ending of &#8220;Planetarium,&#8221; about Caroline Herschel; the entire poem is <a href=\"http:\/\/www.poetryfoundation.org\/poem\/175906\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I have been standing all my life in the<br \/>\ndirect path of a battery of signals<br \/>\nthe most accurately transmitted most<br \/>\nuntranslatable language in the universe<br \/>\nI am a galactic cloud so deep  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;so invo-<br \/>\nluted that a light wave could take 15<br \/>\nyears to travel through me    &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;     And has<br \/>\ntaken  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I am an instrument in the shape<br \/>\nof a woman trying to translate pulsations<br \/>\ninto images  &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;for the relief of the body<br \/>\nand the reconstruction of the mind.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Adrienne Rich, one of the leading American poets of the 20th century, died on Tuesday at the age of 82. Anything you read about her will emphasize her identity as a feminist and a lesbian, which is perfectly appropriate, but don&#8217;t let it get in the way of the fact that she was an amazingly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/preposterousuniverse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}