Sunday, June 5, 2011

Rich, Adrienne. "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" and "Diving Into the Wreck"

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/adrienne_rich/2425

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15228

1 comment:

  1. Throughout the class this has been one of my favorite poems we have read. Having been scuba diving it’s astounding how accurate her description of the decent into the water seems. She uses this as a metaphor for the struggles that women writers have undergone. In the first stanza she refers to Jacques Cousteau who was a French naval officer. Being a man he had his whole team to assist him and follow his command for he was the captain, while she only has herself to explore the wreck and uncover the treasures that may be there. Other women are not willing to help because they themselves have had struggles to reach even a position of acknowledgment. In the first stanza the narrator says “First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade I…” referring to one person, herself. Showing the battle that one person faces in the world of writing. Then, the last stanza of the poem says “We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.” Here she is referring to the struggle that all women have faced in trying to be taken seriously in their writing. Women who are ready and armed with intelligence and things necessary to survive but things that they cannot call their own because they are written by men and designed by men which is what it seems the narrator is trying to change.

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