The Unslept Unsleeping Elsewhere: Radical Contemporaneity in the Last Poems of Adrienne Rich

Abstract

There are two perspectives on the commoditized present: one, a reified now which is based on a perpetual holiday from social reality and another, a radical contemporaneity which embraces the “foreverness” of the present through a commitment to change. The notion of contemporaneity in Adrienne Rich’s poems written from 2005 onwards especially the volume titled TNPWS: Poems: 2007-2010 responds ethically and politically to the market version of the eternalized ‘now’ which is self-induced forgetting. In choosing to be part of a political community, the contemporary in Adrienne Rich embraces the now as a life lived through, in and for the others. The sense of being one with the age in which you live through its social and political problems and the demand that these issues be addressed dominate Adrienne Rich’s poetpersona in her last work. Illness and coming of death offer an insight into the nature of the contemporaneous; they throw light on the idea that the present continues as life moves from the past into the future. In contrast to a notion of the “contemporary” as one who forgets and then drifts into nostalgia, the contemporary in Rich is one who, though falling asleep, is “not oblivious/ of the unslept unsleeping/ elsewhere.”