What an Adrienne Rich Poem Says About Writing, Creativity and Gender
I explore “Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich, a poet whose work explored female identity, patriarchal oppression, and sexuality
In “Diving into the Wreck,’ the late poet Adrienne Rich provides a map to her creative process. The poem, the story of a scuba diver who has gone into the depths of the ocean to explore a shipwreck, suggests how Rich, known for her feminist sensibilities, negotiated writing creatively in mid-20th century America, a time when literary ecosystem was even more male-dominated than it is today.
“Diving,” then, suggests a possible solution to the idea that “women can’t write,” a prejudicial phenomenon typical in the nineteenth and twentieth century, by proposing that the spirit and soul, the murky unconsciousness (the ocean in the poem) from where poetry and art springs is androgynous. The deepest caves of our interior, where the truest truths lie, belong to all sexes.
The narrator of “Diving into the Wreck” (which here will be taken as a stand-in for Rich herself) describes what the process of tapping into some “truth” or perhaps the “collective unconscious,” the wellsprings of creativity, feels like. The poem begins with the diver describing her equipment, the…
