{"id":1488,"date":"2019-12-18T05:03:44","date_gmt":"2019-12-18T10:03:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/?p=1488"},"modified":"2019-12-18T05:05:37","modified_gmt":"2019-12-18T10:05:37","slug":"liminality-in-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/lindheimmarx\/liminality-in-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Liminality in Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Stranger\u201d by Adrienne Rich<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rich, Adrienne, et al.<\/span> Collected Poems: 1950-2012<\/span><\/i>. W.W. Norton & Company, 2016.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Looking as I\u2019ve looked before, straight down the heart<\/span><\/p>\n

of the street to the river<\/span><\/p>\n

walking the rivers of the avenues<\/span><\/p>\n

feeling the shudder of the caves beneath the asphalt<\/span><\/p>\n

watching the lights turn on in the towers<\/span><\/p>\n

walking as I\u2019ve walked before<\/span><\/p>\n

like a man, like a woman, in the city<\/span><\/p>\n

my visionary anger cleansing my sight<\/span><\/p>\n

and the detailed perceptions of mercy<\/span><\/p>\n

flowering from that anger<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

if I come into a room out of the sharp misty light<\/span><\/p>\n

and hear them talking a dead language<\/span><\/p>\n

if they ask me my identity<\/span><\/p>\n

what can I say but<\/span><\/p>\n

I am the androgyne<\/span><\/p>\n

I am the living mind you fail to describe<\/span><\/p>\n

in your dead language<\/span><\/p>\n

the lost noun, the verb surviving<\/span><\/p>\n

only in the infinitive<\/span><\/p>\n

the letters of my name are written under the lids<\/span><\/p>\n

of the newborn child<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

This poem, by Adrienne Rich, identifies the poet herself as \u201cthe androgyne,\u201d describing herself as \u201clike a man, like a woman.\u201d This claim, along with the flowery language of the poem, pulls Rich out of the realm of the real and into the realm of the symbolic. However, as a consequence, this relegates androgyny into the realm of the artistic.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rich enjoyed toying around with the figure of the androgyne, but this is the clearest statement of who the androgyne actually is. The language is cryptic, and statements like “the lost noun, the verb surviving \/ only in the infinitive” seem to\u00a0mean<\/em> less than they do\u00a0evoke<\/em> a certain incomprehensibility; in other words, they seem to be not a clue to the meaning of Rich’s androgyne, but rather confuse the reader in the way that Rich believes the androgyne would.<\/p>\n

I find this rather uncomfortable. Rich describes the androgyne as something that can’t truly be understood in binary language (“the living mind you fail to describe \/ in your dead language”) but at the same time the fact that she writes this poetry implies that on some deep level she does understand the androgyne. I dislike this because it appropriates the image of the androgyne from a still-binary perspective, as Rich identified as a woman. Can androgyny be written in our dead language? Possibly more importantly, can it be written by a man or a woman?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe Stranger\u201d by Adrienne Rich   Rich, Adrienne, et al. Collected Poems: 1950-2012. W.W. Norton & Company, 2016.   Looking as I\u2019ve looked before, straight down the heart of the street to the river walking the rivers of the avenues … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2254,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lindheimmarx"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1488"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1533,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1488\/revisions\/1533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/engl113-f18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}