I’ve come to hate the term “problematic fave.” Many times it’s used merely to laugh away one’s consumption of what in previous times was termed a “guilty pleasure.” Adrienne Rich, this Sunday night’s featured poet, was the first modern poet I seriously read, when sometime in the mid- to late 1980s I picked up her selected poems collection The Fact of a Doorframe. Through her I grew to love poetry, and after all these years I can still quote many of her lines by heart — I even included or alluded to some of them in my book on Sweet Blue Flowers. She’s also the poet who led me to re-read Emily Dickinson with a fresh eye, and to read Muriel Rukeyser for the first time.

Adrienne Rich was also a TERF. More correctly, she was a close friend of, influence on, and advisor to Janice Raymond, the ur-TERF from whom all others directly or indirectly descend. This association has been pretty much memory-holed by those writing about Rich, and I can’t recall it being mentioned in Rich’s own writings; I discovered it only last year when researching an earlier version of this series. Though there’s some question as to whether or not Rich fully shared Raymond’s views, she apparently never explicitly disavowed them.

That inevitably taints my experience reading Adrienne Rich today, and I daresay would taint yours as well. That in turn caused me to consider whether or not I should include her in this series. When I first did this series in another place I decided not to. But, on re-thinking it, I decided, for better or worse, that it would be dishonest of me to memory-hole my love of Rich’s poetry, just as it would be dishonest of me not to mention her TERF associations. Here, then, is the very first poem of hers I read, the one that prompted me to read more: