A man walking on the street
feels unwell has felt unwell
all week, a little. . . Give me your living hand
   If I could take the hour
death moved into you undeclared, unnamed
--even if sweet, if I could take that hour.

Rich mourns this sensitive, invaluable poetic interpreter and teacher who died of AIDS.

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Committed to plumbing her various heritages, Rich's poetry contains depths and breadths of psychological and social meanings that resonate to and from identities, subjectivities, rationalities, and emotions.

Rich has, as Olga Broumas notes, "extraordinary powers--of perception, eloquence, rhythm, courage, the rare fusion of vision and action, the ability to suggest not only to others but to herself a course of action in the mind and follow it in the next breath in the world," and thus many are "drawn by the mind of [this] woman whose work and life have been an act of becoming conscious against the established order."

As Gloria Bowles observed more than a decade ago, Adrienne Rich has time and again exhorted feminist scholars to remain "dedicated to the process of discussion and reformulation," always remaining open to the previously unimaginable possibilities of reconceptualization.

In "Voices from the air" (1993), Rich declared of her medium that

A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience. But we seek that experience, or recognize it when it is offered to us, because it reminds us in some way of our need. After that rearousal of desire, the task of acting on that truth, or making love, or meeting other needs, is ours.

Adrienne Rich lends new meaning to Ralph Waldo Emerson's nineteenth-century proclamation that the poet is no mere versifier but a seer and sayer, for this American lesbian feminist poet utters truths denied or previously unrealized so plainly, memorably, and forcibly that they demand to be reckoned with. Indeed, the vast number of books, articles, and papers published on Rich testify to the generative nature of her work.

More than two decades ago, Rich answered her own repeatedly reiterated query in "Natural Resources" (1977): "I have to cast my lot with those / who age after age, perversely, / with no extraordinary power, / reconstitute the world."

Through her monumental gift of poetry and her activism on behalf of lesbian and gay liberation and civil rights for everyone, she has indeed cast her lot with those who reconstitute the world. Her poems, her essays, interviews, and speeches are all a call to action, for they each remind us, as she remarked in 1991, that "Experience is always larger than language."

Since Stonewall various political agendas have dominated American lesbian literature.

Compulsory heterosexuality is the assumption that women and men are innately attracted to each other emotionally and sexually and that heterosexuality is universal, a view that leads to an institutional inequality of power that privileges heterosexual males and denigrates women, especially lesbians.

A poetic response to the death of a greatly loved person, the elegy has had since classical times a homoerotic component.

Feminist literary theory is a complex, dynamic area of study that draws from a wide range of critical theories.

The Gay Left refers to a cluster of positions on the political spectrum that has existed within the lesbian and gay rights movement at least since the Stonewall riots.

The theory that gender relations are socially constructed categories of meaning has opened up a number of new areas in lesbian, gay, and queer studies.

Since the histories of gay men and lesbians are radically different, the challenge is to describe interrelations in the gay and lesbian literary heritages without blurring them into each other.

Jewish-American gay and lesbian literature is marked by its rich heritage, diverse subject matter, and thriving vitality.

Although gay, lesbian, and queer theory are related practices, the three terms delineate separate emphases marked by different assumptions about the relationship between gender and sexuality.

Since the 1960s, the general trend in lesbian poetry has been collective and political rather than purely aesthetic.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, intimate, exclusive, and often erotic romantic friendships between women were largely perceived as normal and socially acceptable.

One of the most accomplished poets of the twentieth century, W. H. Auden found that his gayness led him to new insights into the universal impulse to love and enlarged his understanding of all kinds of relationships.

Greek-born lesbian poet and translator Olga Broumas writes openly erotic poems that combine ancient Greek echoes and late twentieth-century idiom.

Jamaican-born writer Michelle Cliff explores issues of race, class, and sexuality in her prose and poetry.

The forthrightly gay Allen Ginsberg is probably the best-known American poet to emerge in the post-World War II period.

The work of African-American activist and writer Audre Lord was greatly influenced by her lesbianism.

Through her writing, teaching, editing, and activism, Joan Nestle has devoted her life to promoting awareness of glbtq culture and advancing glbtq equality.

Award-winning author Minnie Bruce Pratt has written moving and erotic poems and stories that explore sex and gender issues, as well as powerful essays that decry bigotry in its many forms.

In her explorations of the damage done to the individual self by racism and sexism, Alice Walker views lesbianism as natural and freeing, an aid to self-knowledge and self-love.