Adrienne Rich 85th Birthday Poetry Reading
Adrienne Rich 85th Birthday Poetry Reading, Friday, May 16, 8:15pm. Continuing our occasional series, the After Shul Special, BCC presents a celebration of the legacy of renowned Jewish lesbian feminist poet Adrienne Rich (1929–2012), on what would be her 85th birthday. Featuring two award-winning poets, Jenny Factor and Kevin Simmonds, the evening will also include brief readings by BCC members and special guests. (No open mic.) Curated by Sylvia Sukop and Bonnie S. Kaplan. Admission is free.
This event has made it to the Jewish Journal!
Poet and essayist Adrienne Rich was one of America’s foremost public intellectuals. Widely read and hugely influential, Rich’s career spanned seven decades and has hewed closely to the story of post-war American poetry itself. Her earliest work, including A Change of World (1951) which won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award, was formally exact and decorous, while her work of the late 1960s and 70s became increasingly radical in both its free-verse form and feminist and political content. Rich’s metamorphosis was noted by Carol Muske in the New York Times Book Review; Muske wrote that Rich began as a “polite copyist of Yeats and Auden, wife and mother. She has progressed in life (and in her poems …) from young widow and disenchanted formalist, to spiritual and rhetorical convalescent, to feminist leader…and doyenne of a newly-defined female literature.”
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