Adrienne Rich is Dead. Long Live Adrienne Rich.

I read the news today that Adrienne Rich--arguably the most important politically-engaged poet in the United States--is dead.  But somehow, I don't feel grief.  Is it because I never knew her except in the words she trailed, like comet's light?  What a vibrating, pulsing voice in the words she left behind, lighting the dark.  Consider, for example, the monumental and yet vulnerably awake, in this fugitively placarded video: "North American Time":

If I write one line as important as any of hers, it will have been worth the grief of writing.  Opening any of her books was to be opened.