"Nothing Else Left to Read": Poetry and Audience in Adrienne Rich's "An Atlas of the Difficult World"

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Adrienne Rich comments that the title poem of her 1991 volume, An Atlas of the Difficult World, "reflects on the condition of my country, which I wrote very consciously as a citizen poet, looking at the geography, the history, the people of my country" (345). The specific event that led Rich to write a poem about the present condition of the United States was the Persian Gulf War of 1991, which on a different occasion she describes as the first Bush administration's ploy to distract people from domestic "anger and despair" ("I Happen to Think" 33). "An Atlas of the Difficult World" is an extended inquiry into the nature of patriotism in time of war—as Rich says in the poem: "I am bent on fathoming what it means to love my country" (Atlas 22). It functions as both geography and history, offering a panoramic view of 1980s and early 1990s America—the "difficult world" of the title—haunted by the contradictory legacies of freedom and oppression, idealism and materialism, democracy and capitalism. Like Whitman, whose characteristic techniques of catalogue and anecdote she borrows in her poem, Rich recognizes the great promise of America, but also acknowledges its negative elements. Like Muriel Rukeyser, the second important precursor in the poem, she takes her readers on a road trip to places they otherwise would never hazard to explore. Approximating in length T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and even including some endnotes, "An Atlas of the Difficult World" offers a picture of present-day America in a state of crisis which, Rich hopes, can nevertheless be reversed and resolved.

The 1980s mark an important change in Rich's poetry from the predominantly feminist focus of the previous decade to a sustained interest in the paradoxes of American history. In 1984 she moved from New York City to Santa Cruz, California, a momentous decision for a writer who often emphasizes the linkage between social commitment and consciousness of location. Beginning with the early 1980s, she also immersed herself in the writings of Karl Marx and—much like that fellow "geographer of the human condition" (Rich, Arts 4)—devoted her intellectual energies to measuring the impact of repressive economic circumstances on human relations. The poems she composed during the decade provide evidence of her growing preoccupation with the idea of civic responsibility, which she frequently (and characteristically) approaches through explorations of her own personal life as a woman, feminist thinker, Jew, lesbian, activist, and poet. While A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and Sources (1983) can still be seen as works belonging to the earlier period, with the publication of transitional volume Your Native Life, Your Life (1986), and especially with Time's Power (1989), Rich began the latest phase of her career, in which she considers her life and writing in relation to larger problems of American history. "An Atlas of the Difficult World" can still be seen as a poem addressing the unfulfilled promise of the women's liberation movement. Some of the individuals featured in the poem happen to be women and the way in which Rich depicts their oppression by forces of misogyny and homophobia (using such sources as a daily newspaper and Gay Community News) illustrates her continuing commitment to radical feminism. But on several occasions in An Atlas Rich conflates male and female identities—as in the memorable image of the nurse in the part XI—and a number of individuals, like prison inmate George Jackson and the lonely peregrinator of part VIII, are explicitly portrayed as male characters. In her book The Dream of the Dialogue, Alice Templeton takes note of this gender-inclusive character of the poem, arguing that it honors both male and female individuals, "the disenfranchised, the dispossessed, the 'internal emigrant,' and difficult truths, not the mock-innocent, the colonizer, the madness of solitude, or the deception of simplistic alliances and oppositions" (164–65). Margaret Dickie likewise writes about "An Atlas of the Difficult World" as a poem with...