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On "Trying to Talk with a Man" Susan Stanford Friedman By the early seventies, Rich firmly connected the public

culture of violence with the politics of the personal and the system of patriarchy--as a poem like "Trying to Talk with a an" !"#$"%, set near a bombing test sight, vividly demonstrates& From Signs !"#'(%& argaret )twood The first poem, "Trying to Talk with a an, " occurs in a desert, a desert which is not only deprivation and sterility, the place where everything e*cept the essentials has been discarded, but the place where bombs are tested& The "+" and the ",ou" have given up all the frivolities of their previous lives, "suicide notes" as well as "love-letters, " in order to undertake the risk of changing the desert- but it becomes clear that the "scenery" is already "condemned," that the bombs are not e*ternal threats but internal ones& The poet reali.es that they are deceiving themselves, "talking of the danger / as if it were not ourselves / as if we were testing anything else&" 0ike the wreck, the desert is already in the past, beyond salvation though not beyond understanding& From The New York Times Book Review& !"#$(%& 1leanor 2ilner "Trying to Talk with a an" !"#$"% is testing bombs in the desert, but it is she !not he% who refuses sublimation, who knows what these bombs mean3 "ourselves / as if we were testing anything else&" From American Poetry Review !"#$4%& 5ary 6elson The devices that order her poems are the very ones that open the field of associations& +n "Trying to Talk with a an," the first lines seem flatly factual and public3 "7ut in this desert we are testing bombs, / that8s why we came here&" )s the poem progresses, the recognition that political and interpersonal violence reflect one another grows& 9olitical violence vents personal frustration that may itself be historically determined& +nterpersonal violence is political and theatrical- its destructive, e*plosive testing mimics public antagonisms& +n another poem a woman asks a man what he is feeling and his silent response is at once somatic and political3 "6ow in the torsion of your body," she reali.es, "as you defoliate the fields we lived from/ + have your answer&" :ere in "Trying to Talk with a an" the final lines bring these recognitions to a conclusion3 talking of the danger as if it were not ourselves as + if we were testing anything else&

These lines bring the poem round to its beginning and thereby make it whole& ,et that very unity is a trap for the poem8s readers, one from which they cannot easily e*tricate themselves& 7ur pleasure in the poem as a verbal construct confronts us with a conflation of self and history that leaves us no apparent margin of freedom& :elen ;endler argues that in this volume the war is "added as a metaphor &&& for illustration of the war between the se*es rather than for especially political commentary," but + believe Rich depicts the relationship between politics and personal life as more comple*ly interdependent& +t is not even a case of two separate domains whose traditional metaphors may be used to illuminate each other& +n Rich8s best poetry politics and personal life act out an unstable mi* of mimesis and determinism& From Our Last First poets: ision an! "istory in #ontemporary American Poetry& 5opyright < "#'" by the Board of Trustees of the =niversity of +llinois& )lice Templeton The first poem in $iving into the %reck& "Trying To Talk with a an," offers an important >ualification to the epic e*tension between inner and outer life in "2hen 2e ?ead )waken&" This opening poem can be read as Rich8s farewell to marriage, a theme echoed later in "From a Survivor" and in "2hen 2e ?ead )waken" as the female companion gives up "keeping track of anniversaries" and begins to write in her "diaries / more honestly than ever&" )gain, in "Trying to Talk with a an" the landscape of modern civili.ation, "this condemned scenery" of a bomb-testing site, provides an epic e*tension of the inner affliction, which is a feminist consciousness that is accompanied by a loss of faith in the honesty of daily culture3 "whole 09 collections, films we starred in / &&& the language of love-letters, of suicide notes, / afternoons on the riverbank/ pretending to be children&" The "condemned scenery," which is "surrounded by a silence / that sounds like the silence of the place / e*cept that it came with us / and is familiar," is a landscape of consciousness, yet it possesses the physical, ethical dangers of a bombtesting site& :ere the poet feels "more helpless / with you than without you" because the other person misconstrues the risks and responsibilities of being in the place, and so fails to recogni.e the poet8s way of being there3 ,ou mention the danger and list the e>uipment we talk of people caring for each other in emergencies--laceration, thirst-but you look at me like an emergency ,our dry heat feels like power your eyes are stars of a different magnitude they reflect lights that spell out3 1@+T when you get up and pace the floor talking of the danger as if it were not ourselves as if we were testing anything else& The poem opens the volume acknowledging what the epic proAection is not: it is not simply an e*ternal "fault" that must be guarded against- it is also an internal affliction for which the poet is responsible and to which she must be responsive&

From The $ream an! the $ia'ogue: A!rienne Rich(s Feminist poetics& 5opyright < "##B by The =niversity of Tennessee 9ress& Cohn Dery Two earlier Rich poems, "6ight-9ieces3 For a 5hild" and "The ?emon 0over," anticipate her later use of nuclear imagery to depict subAective e*perience& +n the former poem, the poet as a young mother an*ious about her child suddenly wakes up in the middle of the night "in a dark/ hourless as :iroshima/ almost hearing you breathe/ in a cot three doors away" and then combines the primeval and the modern, when the mother imagines herself and her infant "swaddled in a dumb dark/ old as sickheartedness, / modern as pure annihilation," as the two of them "drift in ignorance&" "The ?emon 0over" also combines progeny and aimlessness with annihilation, when Rich records a dream about being bombed, and then adds3 The end is Aust a straw, a feather furling slowly down, floating to light by chance, a breath on the long-loaded scales& 9osterity trembles like a leaf and we go on making heirs and heirlooms& +n this poem the spectre of nuclear annihilation has the contours of the emptiness in a self-enclosed relationship& +n "Trying to Talk with a an," the title and language point not to the landscape of holocaust, as "1arly 2arning" does in its intentionally misleading way, but to the intimacy of a collapsing marriage& ,et like Turner, Rich Au*taposes the imagery of domestic life against the arid "condemned scenery" of a 6evada test site3 the "underground river/ forcing its way between deformed cliffs," the "dull green succulents," the "silence of the place," "laceration, thirst&" +nstead of using familiar images to portray e*treme horror, Rich uses e*treme images to e*press the deadening effects of a painful breakup between a man and a woman3 7ut here + feel more helpless with you than without you ,ou mention the danger and list the e>uipment we talk of people caring for each other in emergencies--laceration, thirstE but you look at me like an emergency ,our dry heat feels like power your eyes are stars of a different magnitude they reflect lights that spell out3 1@+T when you get up and pace the floor talking of the danger as if it were not ourselves as if we were testing anything else&

+n this poem, not only does our shared notion of a nuclear e*plosion !together with the e*pectation that weapons tested will inevitably be used% convey the despair of the poet, but in a fashion more subtle than in either "2hen" or "1arly 2arning," Rich8s poem weaves a distinctly subAective yet broadly human e*perience into the very fabric of our conception of nuclear weapons, together with our impotence in containing them& The personal dread created by a failed relationship e>uals the deep cultural dread associated with annihilation& "Talking of the danger" of one reiterates e*actly "8talking of the danger" of the other, because in both cases we are talking about ourselves and testing ourselves& )s Turner and Rich both insinuate, only by acknowledging that it is we who are being tested will we begin to see our way through that danger& By metaphorically integrating nuclear imagery and the fear of annihilation with more private dimensions of e*perience, apocalyptic lyric poets may not always e*press direct opposition to nuclearism, but, at their best, they broaden the figurative scope of both political poetry and the personal lyric in ways that reflect the age in which they are composed& "Trying to Talk with a an" is finally neither solely about gender relations nor about nuclearism- it is about both& 7nce Rich8s poem establishes its peculiar but intricate bond between these two critical concerns, our sense of both is irreversibly altered, as she speaks through the nuclear present& 2hether or not the reconstruction of thought her poem embodies can lead to our survival is debatable, but without such a reconstruction we remain mired in our present inade>uate modes of thinking& From %ays o) Nothingness: Nuc'ear Annihi'ation an! #ontemporary American Poetry& 5opyright < "##F by the Board of regents of the State of Florida&

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