Catharine Stimpson (Essay Date Spring-Summer and Fall-Winter 1985)

SOURCE: Stimpson, Catharine. "Adrienne Rich and Lesbian/Feminist Poetry." Parnassus 12-13, nos. 2-1 (spring-summer and fall-winter 1985): 249-68.

In the following essay, Stimpson traces the development of lesbian and feminist themes throughout Rich's poetic career.

… it is the subjects, the conversations, the facts we shy away from, which claim us in the form of writer's block, as mere rhetoric, as hysteria, insomnia, and constriction of the throat.¹

Four years after … (Adrienne Rich) published her first book, I read it in almost disbelieving wonder; someone my age was writing down my life … I had not known till then how much I had wanted a contemporary and a woman as a speaking voice of life.…²

"Lesbian." For many, heterosexual or homosexual, the word still constricts the throat. Those "slimy" sibilants; those "nasty" nasalities. "Lesbian" makes even "feminist" sound lissome, decent, sane. In...