Feminist Reading of Poetry

Once in a while, you come across a piece of writing that deeply resonates with what lives inside you, in words you did not have yet. That happened to me, on a sleepless night. I fell in a YouTube rabbit hole and ended up at a recording of Adrienne Rich’ ‘Diving Into the Wreck’, a feminist poem from 1973. It struck me that, forty-seven years later, Rich’ comparisons and images have lost nothing of their eloquence or relevance. This rich poem offers a variety of interpretations. I have found diving as a physical and literal experience is used in this marvellous poem as a metaphor to describe the transcending of human limitations. It redefines and blurs the parameters of what is considered to be ‘normal’ to become a symbolic encounter of misfitting within an alien environment, be it emotional, political, or even the transition between life and death, and possibly gender.

The paper analyses gender related and feminist aspects in the poetry of a contemporary American poetess Ursula Rucker who has been writing and performing, for almost two decades, at the meeting point of popular culture and high art, in a characteristic genre of spoken word. By analysing a selection of Rucker’s poems, the author attempts to identify the layers of African-American social and cultural heritage, as well as to locate the poetess within the tradition of Black poetry and explain her poetic expression as an amalgam of revolutionary and activist poetry written by Black women in 1970’s and modern tendencies related to hip-hop culture. For the purpose of contextualisation of Ursula Rucker’s opus, the paper also contains a brief genesis of Black feminism and contemporary Afro-American literary expression.