Page 16 THE980DREAMOF A COMMON The Dream of a Common Language, Poems 1974-1977, by Adrienne Rich, 1978, 77 pp.,-$3.95 paper, from: On Lies, Secrets and Silence, Selected • Prose 1966-1978, by Adrienne Rich, 1979, 310 pp., $3.95 paper, from: Of Woman Born, Motherhood as Experience and Institution, by Adrienne .Rich, 1976, 328 pp., $2.95 from: W.W."Norton & Co., Inc. 500 Fifth Ave. W.W. Norton & Co., Inc. Bantam Books, Inc. • 414 East Golf Rd. New York, NY10036 I first heard of Adrienne Rich from a friend, someone who dragged me to hear her talk at one of the innumerable political and scholarly conferences that occur continuously in Amherst, Massachusetts. Later, driving cross-country with another frien,d, I read out loud as she drove and she read as I drove, from book's that were important to us ; The shared reading • was a new way to.learn. Misunderstandings .were clarjfied as they came up and new ideas grew as fast as the scenery c_hanged. Learning has since become a joint effort, something we share around the kitchen table after dinner. -KD ,,. ,,. ,,. It's been many y~ars since my friend Anne and I read Adrienne Rich to each other, one of us painting or planting while the other read-that summer of "ah ha's!" when we discovered each other through this poet. One of the first things Kiko said as he jumped back into our ./ife here was, "I want to work on this Adrienne Rich stuff I'm reading," and he brought out this satchel of Rich's books that we've been reading our way through • ever since. -CC - EVIL CONT. Grassroots anti-war activism during Vietnam has left both an unfinished legacy and a warning to today's soft energy path advocates and anti-nuclear activists. The legacy is the yet-in-process ·empowerment of people against a power structure whose vision has died and whose strength has turned to abuse. The le.sson is that we · must not only deal with nuclear or s,olar power, but with their •roots in and implications for our individual and collective values, strengths and weaknesses, and organizational structures. Theimplications of a technological change go far beyond the technology itself. As centralizing and decentralizing forces work toward their divergent goals within our energy adjustments, the goals, implications, and capabilities of each are becoming dearly visible, llnd a vast shift in credibility, confidence, support and accomplishment is taking place. The future is taking form in our every act. In an important way, understanding the depths of the corporate/ government efforts to exploit us at home and abroad makes it easier to deal.with specific social problems. The failures of government efforts to solve urban, energy, housing or agricultural problems·no longer gives a sense of frustration, of impotence, or of the labyrinthine complexity of the problems. As we realize that there was never any intention to solve them, we realize that the "solutions"-from urban renewal to low-income housing to deregulaDes Plai,nes, IL 60016 So often feminism is misconstrued as an aggressive'attempt to separate women from men, but the work of feminists is to rediscover and describe the other half of a "conversation" that has been, in fact, for so long a soliloquy. • • The work of this_woman has become important, in various ways, to many people. Adrienne Rich is published and recognized by the academic community, sponsored by and invited to the very institutions she denounces-and at the same time surrounded by and involved with a very strong and political group of women_. Adrienne Rich the scholar/poet and Adrienne Rich the radical feminist is rebuilding language_:_making it complex and specific to the woman half of the dialogue. ... what in fact I keep choosing are these words, these whispers, conversations from which time after time the tmth breaks moist andgreen.. These lines come'from her poem "Cartographies of Silence," in a collection titled The Dream of a Common Language. The title is apt; the poet's primary effort is not expended in an attempt to achieve "the revolution"-nor is it rhetori<; for a "new" society or a more "just government"-her work (prose as well as poetry) is addressed instead to the tools with which we go about trying to teach, to grow, to understand-and to make real change. Language is the "technology" with which we build all other technolog~es; what we shape with our hands we shape first with our words. It is time that we frame our own questions ... and that we do so with a full recognition of the weight of the language, theodicy, and politics that would obstmct our doing so. (LSS, p. 16) tion of oil to "bailouts" of the finances of New York City, Cleveland or.Chicago, are all frauds set up to exploit further the situations behind a facade of solving them. Once we understand that, it also becomes obvious that where we've been looking is not where the problems are. And we now .know where to look for them-in the financing, tax, regulatory, credit, and legal rackets that have been set up to assist the corpo-rape of America. Already . some real answers a_!e emerging. , To realize that both domestic a:nd foreign problems stem from a deep and pervasive abuse of our political and economic system is ironically reassuring. For any system can be corrupted; and most every system goes through cycles of integrity and decay. At the zenith of their power and seeming invincibility, all things carry the seed of their own destruction and the seed pf what will replace them. One looks powerful, the other frail. But one is waxing and the other waning. It is appropriate that at the moment corporate America seems most victorious and unassailable, and when our will to counter it is weakest, that the opportunity to do so opens its way. The·process will not he easy-power once obtained is seldom relinquished willingly. But we can be thankful that our democratic tradition allows us to expect better than whiwwe have, and hope that it will be strong enough to allow a relatively non-violent r~turn of power to the people and restoration of our institutions to humane and life-enhancing operation. • .
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