PersonalUniversalRICH

I want to touch upon the subject this post's title suggests, but first I want to comment upon your idea of variations on a theme, so beautifully described ("waltzes over so much terrain", etc.). I'm reminded of this idea with which I'm enamored: the way in which multiplicity reveals an common, unmovable truth. (It occurs to me now that this, too, is a discussion of the personal and the universal.) I see Joyce and Beckett as opposites in this way: Beckett tries to get at the truth by gradually eliminating superfluous. Joyce, on the other hand, presents a multiplicity (the different stories of Dubliners, the different styles of Ulysses), and lets the truth sit comfortably at their center: the common ground, the thing that does not change when everything else does. Rich, I guess, would align herself with Joyce in this way. She takes the different variations, and by stringing them together the reader finds what they have in common (the theme), and knows it. I think I feel this less in Strand, where there's more (at least with "The Story") of a sort of linear plot, a progression.

But the other personal/universal discussion I wanted to have: Rich is one of those poets who seems to like to write about specific stories (sometimes from her own life, sometimes not) in order to illustrate something universal about the world/life. It's obviously a pretty standard way to go about writing. But what interests me is the way it sometimes, in these poems, works for me, and others: not at all. "For the Record" upset me most in this way: I felt that I couldn't appreciate the poem without some context. Is she talking about a specific natural disaster? Where, and when, did the freeways burn, etc.? I feel like, if I had only had a setting, I could have appreciated her descriptions as capturing that moment, and then, myself, drawn the connection between the single event and all others like it. Why does Rich feel the need to remove the specific context herself, to force the universal upon her reader? To me, it seems presumptuous and rude. But I know Ian disagrees (we've discussed), so I'm curious if this is just my bias.

I'd like to contrast "For the Record" with "Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff." Here Rich does provide a very specific context. She makes it clear that this poem is about these two women, at one particular moment in time. It is left for the reader to abstract those coveted universal truths from the piece, and I find this a more satisfying relationship between poet and reader. I can admire the way Rich captures Paula's voice, how she describes that woman's emotions, her sorrow. The universality of it is so obvious, Rich doesn't have to go an extra step (as she does in "Record") and remove the specifies, whittle away the references, so that the situation becomes almost only an allegory. It seems to me a more difficult feat to present both at once, rather than only the general. That said, "Paula" was not my favorite. I liked some lines extremely, but others (the final couplet, for instance) seemed trite. Can't win them all, eh?