I have long been an admirer of Rich's beautiful poetry and ideas. Even though a male reader, I have found her company through her books over the years some of the best. However, in this volume, there is a real lack of vision. Rich comes accross at times like a parody of herself and her causes--instead of celebrating the victories, she acts as if she is hidden and on-the-run. This attitude hurts this otherwise interesting book. Her meditations on aging that appear throughout several poems in this volume are affecting and exciting, but there is still something missing. If you've never read Rich before, start with the works of the seventies; if you have read and loved Rich, then pick this up and settle in with a dear, if slightly crusty, slightly out-of-touch old friend.

I found this book in my local library and decided that I just had to have it! Where else does one search but at Amazon.com ... and there it was! I'm not a beginner in speaking French, but I found that there were plenty of opportunities to brush up on grammar points that I had half forgotten. I'll be recommending it to my students as a useful tool to have on hand.

Adrienne Monnier was one of the hidden focal points of the Lost Generation in Paris. Her bookstore, La Maison des Amis des Livres, was a meeting place for some of the most famous authors of the time and their fans. Joyce, Hemingway, Gide, Colette and Eliot were among her many associates in the literary world. In addition, she was in many ways a trailblazer. She opened her bookstore in 1915, at a time when women in France were obviously not encouraged to do such things. She pioneered the concept of a lending library in France, a luxury that Americans take for granted, and she cultivated a female clientele. She particularly encouraged them to use the library, as many women of the time did not have money of their own, and would not have been able to get money for books from their husbands. This book is a collection of essays, letters, and other writings by Monnier. Most of them appeared in one or more of the various literary journals she published. I found it fascinating because it talks about the period of history just prior to our own, and talks about her observances of the events which many no longer remember. She discusses going to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, her impressions on the young Alec Guiness, and her notes from the very first days of the occupation of Paris by the Germans, which chillingly reveal trying to get her Jewish friend to leave the country. Her observations on the famous people of the time are enhanced by her intimate knowledge of them all, and are, for that very reason, honest and unworshipping. Through the writings, one gets to know Adrienne Monnier and her friends. She is a gourmand, a bookseller, a denizen of Paris, an art lover, a theatre-goer, and a friend. She will provide you with a view of Paris between the World Wars unlike any other.

Rich's poetry is really very intense. It tends to undulate between being ethereal and straight-forward. The first poem really impressed me... especially the line "Two women sleeping together have more than sleep to defend." I really recommend this book. It was my first of Rich's work and I've since gotten 3 of her other books and plan on getting more when I finish reading them.

I was forced to read this book in a class recently by the usual suspect, my feminist professor, and was very sad to see that this piece of lesbian hatred of the family was being pushed upon young women in my class at a vulnerable time of their lives. The usual atmosphere in universities now, in which young women are asked either to agree with feminist diatribes of this sort or be labelled weak and a tool of men, was so plainly at work here. I'm older than the others in my class, and a father and husband, and the book was so plainly the product of a neurotic, unhappy person that I was having difficulty understanding why we were reading it. The vast majority of women want families and to be mothers and wives, and they need help to do it better, not to be force-fed this sort of weak broth. When Rich says of her pregnancy and motherhood, "I only knew that I had lived through something which was considered central to the lives of women... a key to the meaning of life; and that I could remember little except anxiety, physical weariness, anger, self-blame, boredom, and divisions within myself," she admits to something sad, not hoepful, and demeans her children and their worth. Poor, sad, neurotic woman. I think young women would be best served to view this book as something to avoid -- or at least as something to view with pity, and not permit your professors force you to agree with it.

Adrienne Rich's experience as a mother is what propelled her to write this depressing look at motherhood as an institution and at the the patriarchial society that imposes its restrictions and encourages its oppression. It is her own negative experience as a mother that compells her to condemn the entire history of womanhood and its accomplishments. Did Adrienne Rich ever think that perhaps she is projecting her own experiences onto the lives of the general public? A selfish, unloving mother who felt "depressed" throughout her entire experience raising children is certainly not the one to be writing about the experience of motherhood as the general public sees it. Rather than giving practical advice in terms of empowering women, she emasculates men, choosing this as the best method to raise women. Her suggestions as to how women can overcome their "oppression" are buried somewhere underneath poetic phrases relating to her own miserable experiences as a mother. If her kids, aren't in therapy, they should be!

We were asked to do a term paper on Adrienne Rich and some of her poetry. During my research I found this book and it changed my entire view of motherhood..or rather the institution of motherhood. I have never realized how literally confining motherhood is. I look back at what my mom used to tell me about how kids held her back from what she wanted to do, and I realize (with the help of this book) what she ment. Not that was being rude when she said this, just that it is a fact that our patriarchal society uses motherhood to put women in 'their place'. Please if their is one book you take time to read make it this one. Rich writes this analytical book in such a way as to make it sound personal and interesting...not dry and dull. Highly, highly recommend it if you are trying to understand your mother or mothers in general. What an EYE OPENER!

Every once in a while I wonder why, in this age, people still utter the word "feminist" as though it were an obscenity. Then I pick up one of Adrienne Rich's books, and I think, Oh yeah. That's why.

Arts of the Possible purports to be a text on aesthetics, but it winds up more of a text on Adrienne Rich. The "essays" include "Notes" for several talks she's given, and unlike most essays titled "Notes," these really are just her notes, without any effort to flesh them in; the full text of other speeches; some singularly unemlightening "conversations," where she displays her disheartening lack of an understanding of literature; and a few legitimate essays, most that have appeared in other anthologies. In fact, the title piece to her previous collected prose, Blood, Bread and Poetry, is here.

Her argumentative strategy mostly consists of rambling a bit about herself, especially the horrors of growing up in a house filled with books of poetry by white men, making some vague, barely-arguable statements of generalization ("the reading of poetry in an elite academic institution is supposed to lead you. . . not toward a criticism of society, but toward a professional career in which the anatomy of poems is studied dispassionately"--huh?), drawing even more generalized conclusions, and then ranting about the wickedness of capitalism or patriarchy. Often, she takes swings at big-business publishing's utter lack of an aesthetic and slavery to the bottom line, claiming that the larger houses print nothing of worth. What press is this book on? Norton. What press put out her last couple collecteds? Norton. What press has she published just about every volume she's ever spewed out? Norton.

Intriguing.

In many pieces she hints at the theory most expounded in "Defying the Space that Separates," the reprinted inntroduction from the abominable 1996 Best American Poetry: poor people make better art than rich people do. It's a peculiarly Protestant notion (peculiar especially because she makes so much of her oppressed and suppressed Jewish heritage). Sure, you're starving, your teeth are falling out because you can't get decent health care, and you had to sell your baby to an infertile couple from Napersville just to pay your back rent, but you do some really powerful paintings. Not only is this ludicrous on its face, but it's made especially so considering Rich's admitted upbringing in the upper-middle class, attendance at prestigious universities, and current residence in a posh San Francisco neighborhood. She has made quite a living on fashionable compassion for a class with which she's had precious little contact.

T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a host of miserable but financially-comfortable artists dating from the time of the Italian Rennaissance would definitely disagree with her theories, as would I. Having grown up in close contact with plenty of trailer parks and inner-city ghettos, I can guarantee that most the poor--like most the rest of America--are perfectly happy with their singing fish plaques and Jerry Springer Too Hot for TV videos. Many middle- to upper-class white Americans who feel guilty about their own privilege have proposed that disenfranchisement leads to better art. They haven't been right either.

I would put forth that this rhetoric is, in fact, dangerous to the underappreciated sects Rich claims to represent. Works like that 96 Best, which sacrifice artistry and craft to present a political agenda undermine the very cause it purports to promote. If the poor, gays and lesbians, prison inmates, people of marginalized race groups, and the like are represented by bad work, the established hegemony will have every excuse to exclude them from the canon, based on quality and importance in the history of literature.

Rich's prose occasionally breaks into moments of genuine music, but for the most part it's painfully self-aggrandizing, and at times even offensively so. Arts of the Possible feels like nothing so much as a last-ditch effort by a woman who fears she'll be remembered as a radical instead of a writer, or worse, forgotten entirely.

Those of us who take both our politics and our art seriously can only hope that last will indeed come to pass, and that our work will be considered fairly, out of the ugly shadow writers like Rich now cast on anyone whose muse has a political bent.

Please ignore the review above. It's author seems to have missed thepoint entirely. This book is essential reading, as all of Rich's books are. One of our greatest writers.

Fundamentally, this is the dullest, least interesting collection of poetry I've ever seen. And it's deeply hypocritical of Rich as well; her own poetry reveals a woman who is aware not only of feminist and multicultural criticism, but who is also well-versed in the strengths and mysteries poetry can offer. ..................... There isn't a single piece worth reading in the entire book.

It seems like cultural and gender identities are becoming more important than literature itself when it comes to literary criticism. I am very concerned about people who sees this anthology as a victory of feminists and multiculturalists over the so called 'predominantly white male society'. A good literature should appeal to some universal experiences that we in some way understand as human beings. This is why Homer and Li-Po(or Rihaku) appeals to us even to this day, despite the fact that they lived in a different cultural settings. As T. S. Eliot says, "Poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality". A good writer knows that it is what is 'behind the experience that is significant, not the specific content of the experience. To the extent one understands this, they realize the significance of writing 'impersonal poetry' that appeals to all kinds of people in any period of time, so long as they have the intelligence to understand this. It is disappointing to see that even this prestigious anthology would fall into the victim of feminism and multiculturalism, because it is one of the few anthologies out there that offers some genuine poetry.

Rich has gone soft! She cares more for causes, race and gender of the authors than she does for quality. There are about 3 and a half strong poems in the collection, which is the worst edition of Best American Poetry by far.