Adrienne rich what kind of times are these analysis

There has to be more to that story given that both his estranged wife and daughter were active in the Resistance and were arrested, the latter only being saved from Ravensbruck by Allied bombing. Thanks for the comment. And poetry is a wonderful thing! What a wonderful post. Thank you. I knew neither of the Adriennne Rich poem not the Brecht, and both are beautiful, chilling and much too timely. Even Jimmy Carter acknowledges the U. Timely indeed.

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Along with her use of Brecht's poem for her title, Rich's note to the poem includes another reference: the juxtaposition of "truth" and "dread" echoes the conclusion of W.

So this is not Russia, where Mandelstam was "disappeared"; nor is it a South American military dictatorship whose actions led to the coining of the transitive sense of "disappear" usually in the passive voice as "Jorge was disappeared last week". For some American readers, all the words describing this "place between two stands of trees" might well have pointed to such an "elsewhere," a country whose distance from the reader's own makes it easy to condemn.

But this is "not somewhere else but here"; this is "our country," which we readers cannot distance ourselves from. Still, the poem does not name the country in question. The author's name and biography tell us to think of it as the United States, and that specificity is very important to her work. At the same time, the lack of specificity is important to the poem itself, because it does not allow non-American readers to distance themselves from their own countries' atrocities, their own societies' "ways of making people disappear.

In the third stanza, Rich makes her lack of specificity explicit by refusing to identify the place in question:. I won't tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods. I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear. If Rich told us where this "paradise" is, the specificity would relieve anyone from "somewhere else" of responsibility for the "disappearances" the poem refers to. But this refusal to identify the place also protects it from capitalist exploitation, even if the attempt to do so has already failed, just like the revolutions that left the "ghosts" behind at the "crossroads.