Click here to access the historic recordings of Adrienne Rich as well as a brief biography of this author.

Adrienne Rich (b. 1929, Baltimore) is one of the USA's foremost poets, and her poetry's intelligent and outspoken political commitment makes her one of the most provocative. She has been awarded, among others, the Bollingen Prize and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the National Book Award and the Wallace Stevens Award for "outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry"; she has also held an Academy of American Poets Fellowship and a MacArthur Fellowship. However, she refused the National Medal for the Arts in a stand against the policies of the Presidency that tried to award it to her.

Her concerns have been questions of language and history, the denial and claiming of power, the action of poetic imagination in change. This does not, however, make Rich a one-note poet.

Her recording was made on 14 August 2002 at The Audio Workshop, London and was produced by Richard Carrington. . From this page, you can hear the voice of Adrienne Rich reading five of her poems: "In the Evening," "On Edges," "I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus," "For This," and "Fox."

Poetry Archive exists to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience. It came into being as a result of a meeting, in a recording studio, between Andrew Motion, soon after he became U.K. Poet Laureate in 1999, and the recording producer, Richard Carrington. They agreed about how enjoyable and illuminating it is to hear poets reading their work and about how regrettable it was that, even in the recent past, many important poets had not been properly recorded.

Linking with Written Permission.