Dan Chiasson’s review of Adrienne Rich’s Collected Poems 1950-2012 in the June 20 issue of The New Yorker quotes from the best-known poem in Rich’s first book, “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers.” He refers to it as an example of Rich’s early formalism “channeled cunningly” to describe a woman oppressed by domesticity who sublimates her genius and anger into art. I won’t write here about how important Rich was (and is) for me as a writer—enough to say that when I started writing poems in the 1960s, she was one of the few living women represented in contemporary anthologies and available in print. Not that many other models, living or dead, were accessible—in high school we studied Amy Lowell’s “Patterns” and a few poems by Emily Dickinson from our textbook. Six years after Thomas Johnson published his revelatory edition of Dickinson’s work, we still read the old versions sans dashes and capital letters. The last line of the first stanza of the poem numbered 1052 by Johnson (and titled “The Sea” in our assignment) was “Or what a wave might be,” rather than “Or what a Billow be;” the final line was rendered “As if the proof were given,” with the passive result—“proof”—replacing an active process— “checks.”
I taught “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” in my creative writing classes for years while introducing students to the techniques of meter. The elegy is in four line stanzas of iambic pentameter, each containing two rhymed couplets. But many of the poem’s lines don’t scan as five iambs, beginning with the first: “Jennifer” has three syllables, so instead of ten syllables, the line contains eleven. It would have been easy for Rich to call her character “Mary” or “Anna” or some other two-syllable name. Instead, “Jennifer” disrupts the meter, as she does in every line she appears. There’s a volcano under Aunt’s stillness, expressed through the orange embroidery. But even before we grasp the poem’s narrative, the poet has foreshadowed what she’s about by choosing to break her chosen form from the get-go.
Other metrical inversions include the dactyl “denizens” used to describe Aunt’s fierce creation in the poem’s second line. Later in the poem, in a couplet quoted by Chiasson, the meter is disrupted in the first line: “When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie/Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by.” Terror adds an eleventh syllable to the line as it swells, taking up space and usurping the metrical regularity restored in the next line. More than cunning, Rich’s formalism radiates meaning—potential I wanted my students to sense and learn.