The Women Poets and Writers at Barnard series culminated with the impressive and highly acclaimed American writer and feminist Adrienne Rich and South African poet Antjie Krog. These reputable authors spoke at the Altschul auditorium in lieu of the usual small and quaint Sulzberger Parlor. The location, along with the fact that numerous other departments sponsored the event, made the hearing very different from previous experiences with the program. In walking in, there was a sense of importance and formality; the audience had their standards, their expectations. In previous readings, each female writer was someone to discover; her words were freshly exposed, unfamiliar, and meant to be explored, and, one may say, judged. But, last evening, as I sat waiting for these women to speak, I expected something great from, as introduced, the “women who work at knowing what they don’t want to know.”
Antjie Krog opened the program with a poem, which though composed entirely of unfamiliar words, conveys emotions and the true nature of language with a power that I have rarely witnessed. This is largely due to her breathtaking reading, which is rich in fluctuating rhythm, sound, and pace. Her first poem dealt with, as she put it, the “outside, inside tension” of a mountain. This tension was immediately felt as tonality shifted from calm to anguished to morose to excited. Though she kept repeating and weaving the same words and phrases, they nonetheless appeared to change and evolve. Interestingly, Krog’s fiercest, most moving moments in her reading were heard in whispers. The softer she spoke, the more I felt I heard and understood. She finished the poem ever quieter, with broken-up and barely distinguishable words. A loud, long applause followed.
Adrienne Rich gave a meaningful and personal introduction before beginning her readings. She reflected on the tragic and confused state of our world, a reflection that largely resonates in her work. The first work that she read, ‘A Dream and A Death of the Obvious,’ passionately spoke about how we are all “limited by authority” without always knowing what or who that authority really is. She spoke as the woman she describes in her poem, “a woman feeling the fullness of her powers.” Rich grips the tough aspects of the world and the challenges that women are faced with, and responds with blatant opinions and eye-opening observations. It was interesting and refreshing to hear Rich speak of such passionate, and often angry, topics in such a conversational, calm, and rational manner. She spoke, with ease, from the heart. In one poem, though, she removes herself from her own voice. In introducing ‘Letters to a Young Poet,’ she said: “in this poem the voice is not my voice…but the voice of poetry.” In this work, poetry speaks from the place where life really is, where you can “distract your thirst for closure and escape.” Poetry also attacks and questions us humans, asking us what it is meant to “be.” But as this poem comes to a close, poetry questions itself: “who anyway wants to know this pale mouth?”
Rich’s poems emphasize that words are their own beings. Words have a power that allows them to transcend into the physical world- for, as her poem ‘Transparencies’ puts, “Word and body are all we have on the line.” In this poem, Rich likens words to glass- you can “break, “crush,” and “clean” them. Though this metaphor describes the freedom to manipulate and use words, the images’ roughness and sharpness portray words as at times perilous, and always strong and firm.
Krog’s poem, ‘Writing Ode’ describes a same sort of permanence in words. With her gentle, penetrating voice, she read, “words do not manage to leave you, words do not manage to keep you.” The poem goes on to describe a beautiful, romantic, but often painful relationship between her and words. Words are, as in Rich’s work, potentially harmful and frightening in their powerful and ever-lasting presence. But she ends the poem accepting words in their entirety, expressing a pleasure that is felt sexually: “yes, you have come to sleep in me…touch me, tonight.”
One could say, from the work sampled last evening, that Rich delves deeper into a wider social analysis while Krog digs into herself. Yet both displayed a common concern and awe towards words and the body. Krog depicts words as things that have crept into her, that give her life and will never leave. But it is the body that proves that she has this life. In ‘Body Bereft’ she challenges Descartes and asserts: “I have a body therefore I am.” Thus Krog would likely agree with Rich that “word and body are all we have on the line.”
After sharing their words with their audience, the two writers embraced. With bodies interlocked, Rich and Krog exhibited a mutual understanding and appreciation for words.

“When you pit two oppositional characters together, crazy things are going to happen,” Bruce Jay Friedman explains—and, oh yes, his latest compilation of short stories is chalk-full of the aforementioned dichotomy. Take “The Convert,” which pits a Catholic-turned-Jew against a Jew married to a Catholic, or “Neck and Neck,” which follows two men competing for literary fame over the span of several decades. Friedman’s book, Three Balconies (Stories and a Novella) is a terrifically fun read, and affects the same sort of wry, twisted humor found in the screenplay of Splash, Friedman’s Oscar-nominated work. The stories in question were written over the span of several years, and, for the most part, deal with the plight of professional underdogs, i.e., struggling writers, reporters and actors, and Friedman admits that this is, to some extent, an autobiographical inclination on his part: “Many of the stories are an extrapolation of an incident that I had in my life, which, if…expanded… make[s] a story,” Friedman tells me, “there were a lot of forces at work [when I was young] so that I could almost describe myself as sort of an underdog, with sympathy for the underdog; or it may be some sort of automatic connection with people who are struggling.”

When asked about his influences, Friedman replies without hesitation; his reply, however, is roundabout and I am puzzled until I realize that Friedman’s interpretation of the question diverges completely from my conception of it—as I come to realize during the interview, Friedman attaches specific episodic memories to the most basic ideas, turning every answer into something of a short story in itself. In this instance, although he eventually limits his literary influences to Thomas Wolfe, James Jones (From Here to Eternity), J.D. Salinger, and the author of the Big Blue Book of Fairytales, I am treated to a few anecdotes in the process of his explanation. Friedman first outlines his childhood experiences in the Bronx in the forties: “We weren’t a bookish family [but] I discovered the library, and I was always running back and forth…from the street to the bookish life.” Friedman describes himself as essentially “self-taught,” with the radio and people that he heard (in his family, in the street) playing a heavy hand in the development of his understanding of the way humans communicate and build relationships. Finally, Friedman touches on his stint in the Air Force in the fifties, and, surprisingly, this is still incredibly relevant to my initial question—“I had one strong influence in the Air Force,” Friedman details, “My commanding officer was a literary guy, and had me read three books in one weekend…at age 21, I decided it would be nice to be a writer.”

Friedman continues on in this autobiographical vein, telling me about the generation of one of the more popular stories in Three Balconies, “The Investigative Journalist,” which approaches the subject of incarceration with a surprisingly envious attitude: “It stemmed from [my experience working] on the movie Stir Crazy—as part of the research, I visited a prison in Huntsville, Texas, and noticed it was very clean and peaceful. At the time, I was living alone, in the middle of a divorce, so I felt a sort of camaraderie in the prison; [I thought,] What if a fellow like me fell in love with a prison and arranged to get arrested?”

I decide to end by asking Friedman pointedly about the way the inner flap of his latest book describes it as a set of “moral fables”—surely, I think, Friedman will self-effacingly scoff at this grandiose and seemingly irrelevant terminology. But, instead, Friedman replies mysteriously, “Fables? Yeah, the word comes up.” And the truth is, his short stories do have a “tilted” moral quality to them, albeit one that concerns itself less with small Aesop-inspired animals than with contemporary human issues like sex, friendship, and modern religion.