University Communications Poet Adrienne Rich To Give Reading At Emory April 18 WHO: Feminist poet, essayist and activist Adrienne Rich. WHAT: Emory Creative Writing Program Awards Night. Poetry reading by Rich, followed by a reception and book signing. WHEN: 8 p.m., Tuesday, April 18 WHERE: Glenn Memorial Auditorium, 1652 N. Decatur Rd., Emory. COST: Free and open to the public. For more information, call 404-727-4683. Free parking is available in the Fishburne parking deck adjacent to the auditorium. Adrienne Rich is a teacher, activist and award-winning poet. She is the author of "Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998," "An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991," "A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far: Poems, 1978-1981," many other collections of poetry, and four non-fiction books. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Radcliffe University, Rich had been awarded the Yale Younger Poet's award at age 21 by poet W. H. Auden. She also has been the recipient of the National Book Award, the MacArthur Fellowship, the 1996 Tanning Award for Mastery in the Art of Poetry, the Lannan Foundation's 1999 Lifetime Achievement Award, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Common Wealth Award in Literature, two Guggenheim fellowships, the Lambda Book award, and the Fund for Human Rights Award of the National Gay Task Force. "Adrienne Rich's poems, volume after volume, have been the makings of one of the authentic, unpredictable, urgent, essential voices of our time," according to the poet W.S. Merwin. Rich was at the center of controversy for her refusal of the 1997 National Medal for the Arts, one of the nation's most coveted literary honors. The controversy highlights the politically-charged issues at the center of her work: the growing number of disenfranchised citizens in American society. She sees America as a nation that has fallen away from democracy and has instead been "tyrannized by the accumulation of wealth." In explaining why she refused the award, Rich said, "Federal funding for the arts, like the philanthropy of private arts patrons, can be given and taken away. In the long run, art needs to grow organically out of a social compost nourishing to everyone, a literate citizenry, a free, universal, public education complex with art as an integral element, a society without throwaway people, honoring both human individuality and the search for a decent, sustainable common life. In such conditions, art would still be a voice of hunger, desire, discontent, passion, reminding us that the democratic project is never-ending." In a letter to then-president of the National Endowment of the Arts, Jane Alexander, Rich wrote, "Anyone familiar with my work from the early Sixties on knows that I believe in art's social presence-as breaker of official silences, as voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright. In my lifetime I have seen the space for the arts opened by movements for social justice, the power of art to break despair. Over the past two decades I have witnessed the increasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice in our country. "There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice. But I do know that art-in my own case the art of poetry-means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage. The radical disparities of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate. A President cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonoredMy concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist. I could not participate in a ritual which would feel so hypocritical to me."
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