In 1976, Rich began her partnership with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff, which lasted until her death. In her controversial work Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, published the same year, Rich acknowledged that, for her, lesbianism was a political as well as a personal issue, writing, "The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs."[13] The pamphlet Twenty-One Love Poems (1977), which was incorporated into the following year's Dream of a Common Language (1978), marked the first direct treatment of lesbian desire and sexuality in her writing, themes which run throughout her work afterwards, especially in A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far (1981) and some of her late poems in The Fact of a Doorframe (2001).[26] In her analytical work Adrienne Rich: the moment of change, Langdell suggests these works represent a central rite of passage for the poet, as she (Rich) crossed a threshold into a newly constellated life and a "new relationship with the universe".[27] During this period, Rich also wrote a number of key socio-political essays, including "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence", one of the first to address the theme of lesbian existence.[13] In this essay, she asks "how and why women's choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, community, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding".[13] Some of the essays were republished in On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (1979). In integrating such pieces into her work, Rich claimed her sexuality and took a role in leadership for sexual equality.[13]
From 1976 to 1979, Rich taught at City College and Rutgers University as an English professor. In 1979, she received an honorary doctorate from Smith College and moved with Cliff to Montague, MA. Ultimately, they moved to Santa Cruz, where Rich continued her career as a professor, lecturer, poet, and essayist. Rich and Cliff took over editorship of the lesbian arts journal Sinister Wisdom (1981–1983).[28][29] Rich taught and lectured at UC Santa Cruz, Scripps College, San Jose State University, and Stanford University during the 1980s and 1990s.[29] From 1981 to 1987, Rich served as an A.D. White Professor-At-Large for Cornell University.[30] Rich published several volumes in the next few years: Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Blood, Bread, and Poetry (1986), and Time's Power: Poems 1985–1988 (1989). She also was awarded the Ruth Paul Lilly Poetry Prize (1986), the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award in Arts and Letters from NYU, and the National Poetry Association Award for Distinguished Service to the Art of Poetry (1989).[14][22]
In 1977, Rich became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press (WIFP).[31] WIFP is an American nonprofit publishing organization. The organization works to increase communication between women and connect the public with forms of women-based media.
Janice Raymond, in the foreword of her 1979 book The Transsexual Empire, thanked Rich for "constant encouragement"[32] and cited her in the book's chapter "Sappho by Surgery."[33] "The Transsexual Empire" is considered by some LGBT and feminist critics to be transphobic,[34][35][36][37] and many have criticized Rich for her involvement in and support of its production. While Rich never explicitly disavowed her support for Raymond's work, Leslie Feinberg cites Rich as having been supportive during Feinberg's writing of Transgender Warriors.[32][33][38]
By the early 1980s, Rich was using canes and wheelchairs due to rheumatoid arthritis. Diagnosed with the condition at age 22, Rich kept her disability quiet for decades. The cold air in New England motivated Rich and Cliff to settle in California. A 1992 spinal operation required Rich to wear a metal halo screwed into her head.[39]
In June 1984, Rich presented a speech at the International Conference of Women, Feminist Identity, and Society in Utrecht, Netherlands titled Notes Toward a Politics of Location.[40][41] Her keynote speech is a major document on politics of location and the birth of the concept of female "locatedness". In discussing the locations from which women speak, Rich attempts to reconnect female thought and speech with the female body, with an intent to reclaim the body through verbalizing self-representation.[42] Rich begins the speech by noting that while she speaks the words in Europe, she has searched for them in the United States.[40] By acknowledging her location in an essay on the progression of the women's movement, she expresses her concern for all women, not just women in Providence. Through widening her audience to women across the world Rich not only influences a larger movement but she invites all women to consider their existence. Through imagining geographical locations on a map as history and as places where women are created, and further focusing on those locations, Rich asks women to examine where they were created. In an attempt to try to find a sense of belonging in the world, Rich asks the audience not to begin with a continent, country, or house, but to start with the geography closest to themselves –which is their body.[40] Rich, therefore, challenges members of the audience and readers to form their own identity by refusing to be defined by the parameters of government, religion, and home.[40] The essay hypothesizes the women's movement at the end of the 20th century. In an encouraging call for the women's movement, Rich discusses how the movement for change is an evolution in itself. Through de-masculinizing and de-Westernizing itself, the movement becomes a critical mass of many different voices, languages and overall actions. She pleads for the movement to change in order to experience change. She further insists that women must change it.[43] In her essay, Rich considers how one's background might influence their identity. She furthers this notion by noting her own exploration of the body, her body, as female, as white, as Jewish and as a body in a nation.[44] Rich is careful to define the location in which her writing takes place. Throughout her essay, Rich refers back to the concept of location. She recounts her growth towards understanding how the women's movement grounded in Western culture and limited to the concerns of white women, then incorporated verbal and written expression of black United States citizens. Such professions have allowed her to experience the meaning of her whiteness as a point of location for which she needed to take responsibility.[40] In 1986, she published the essay in her prose collection Blood, Bread, and Poetry.[40]
Rich's work with the New Jewish Agenda led to the founding of Bridges: A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends in 1990, a journal for which Rich served as editor.[45] This work explored the relationship between private and public histories, especially in the case of Jewish women's rights. Her next published piece, An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991), won both the Los Angeles Times Book Award in Poetry and the Lenore Marshall/Nation Award as well as the Poet's Prize in 1993 and Commonwealth Award in Literature in 1991.[14][22] During the 1990s Rich joined advisory boards such as the Boston Woman's Fund, National Writers Union and Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa. On the role of the poet, she wrote, "We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation."[46] In July 1994, Rich won the MacArthur Fellowship, the "Genius Grant" for her work as a poet and writer.[47] Also in 1992, Rich became a grandmother to Julia Arden Conrad and Charles Reddington Conrad.[14]
There's a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted who disappeared into those shadows. I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here, our country moving closer to its own truth and dread, its own ways of making people disappear.
—From "What kinds of times are these?"[48]
In 1997, Rich declined the National Medal of Arts in protest against the House of Representatives' vote to end the National Endowment for the Arts as well as policies of the Clinton Administration regarding the arts generally, and literature in particular, stating that "I could not accept such an award from President Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration ... [Art] means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage".[17][49][50] Her next few volumes were a mix of poetry and essays: Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995–1998 (1999), The Art of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (2001), and Fox: Poems 1998–2000 (2001).
In the early 2000s, Rich participated in anti-war activities, protesting against the threat of war in Iraq, both through readings of her poetry and other activities. In 2002, she was appointed a chancellor of the newly augmented board of the Academy of American Poets, along with Yusef Komunyakaa, Lucille Clifton, Jay Wright (who declined the honor), Louise Glück, Heather McHugh, Rosanna Warren, Charles Wright, Robert Creeley, and Michael Palmer.[14] She won the 2003 Yale Bollingen Prize for American Poetry and was applauded by the panel of judges for her "honesty at once ferocious, humane, her deep learning, and her continuous poetic exploration and awareness of multiple selves."[22] In October 2006, Equality Forum honored Rich's work, featuring her as an icon of LGBT history.[51]
In 2009, despite initially having reservations about the movement, Rich endorsed the call for a cultural and academic boycott of Israel, denouncing "the Occupation's denial of Palestinian humanity, destruction of Palestinian lives and livelihoods, the "settlements", the state's physical and psychological walls against dialogue."[52][53]
Rich died on March 27, 2012, at the age of 82 in her Santa Cruz, California, home. Her son, Pablo Conrad, reported that her death resulted from long-term rheumatoid arthritis.[54] Her last collection was published the year before her death. Rich was survived by her sons, two grandchildren[5] and her partner Michelle Cliff.[55]
