'For the Relief of the Body and the Reconstruction of the Mind': Adrienne Rich’s Metamorphoses

Mirosław Miernik

By looking at Adrienne Rich’s poetic and political transitions, this article attempts to demonstrate how her politics of location galvanized her into writing a “whole new poetry.” The source of its newness lies, however, not so much in avant-gardist formal experimentation, but rather in its rootedness in the complexities of lived corporeal experience.It is the body that emerges in Rich’s later writingas a primary form of the subject’s locatedness – the “geography closest in.” Importantly, she views the body as a site of potentiality rather than a passive surface of sociopolitical inscriptions, and refers to corporeal materiality without falling into the trap of naïve essentialism. As I argue, such conceptualization of the body makes Rich’s workparticularly interesting from the neo-materialist perspective.