HADAS, Rachel (Chamberlayne)

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Nationality: American. Born: New York, New York, 8 November 1948. Education: Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1965–69, B.A. 1969; John Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, 1976–77, M.A. 1977; Princeton University, New Jersey, 1977–82, Ph.D. 1982. Family: Married 1) Stavros Kondylis in 1970 (divorced 1978); 2) George Edwards in 1978; one son. Career: Assistant professor, 1981–87, associate professor, 1987–92, and since 1992 professor, Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey. Awards: Isobel M. Briggs traveling fellowship, 1969–70; Vermont Council on the Arts Writers grant, 1975–76; Bread Loaf Writers Conference scholar-ship, 1976; Guggenheim fellowship, 1988–89; Literature award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1990; McGinnis award, Southwest Review, 1990; Elizabeth Matchett Stover Poetry award, Southwest Review, 1991; Hellas award, Hellas Magazine, 1993; Ingram Merrill Foundation fellowship, 1977, 1994. Member: National Book Critics Circle (Board member), 1994; American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1995. Address: 838 West End Avenue, #3A, New York, New York 10025, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Starting from Troy. Boston, Godine, 1975.

Slow Transparency. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1983.

A Son from Sleep. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1987.

Pass It On. Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1989.

Unending Dialogues: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop. Boston, Faber, 1991.

Mirrors of Astonishment. New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1993.

The Empty Bed. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1995.

Halfway Down the Hall: New & Selected Poems. Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1998.

Other

Form, Cycle, Infinity. Cranbury, New Jersey, Associated University Presses, 1983.

Living in Time (essays and poem). New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1990.

The Double Legacy. Boston, Faber, 1995.

Merrill, Cavafy, Poems, and Dreams. Ann Arbor, Michigan, University of Michigan Press, 2000.

Translator, Other Worlds Than This: Translations from Latin, French, &

Modern Greek Poetry. New Brunswick, New Jersey, Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Translator, Oedipus the King, by Seneca. Baltimore, Maryland, Johns Hopkins University Press Roman Drama Series, 1994.

Translator, Helen, by Euripedes. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Press Greek Drama Series, 1997.

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Manuscript Collection: Special Collections and Archives, Alexander Library, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey.

Critical Studies: "Women's Creation Stories" by Lee Upton, in Denver Quarterly (Denver), 23 (2), fall 1988; "From the Greek" by Christopher Benfey, in Parnassus (New York), 16 (2), 1991; "Rachel Hadas, Poet and Essayist: A Bibliography, 1965–1993" by Ann Vreeland Watkins, in Bulletin of Bibliography (Westport, Connecticut), 51 (2), June 1994; "Elegy As History: Three Women Poets 'By the Century's Deathbed"'" by Anita Helle, in South Atlantic Review (Atlanta, Georgia), 61 (2), spring 1996.

Rachel Hadas comments:

My writing seems more various than it really is: I've translated Seneca and Tibullus, Karyotakis and Baudelaire; have written a scholarly study and personal essays and poems about subjects ranging from motherhood to classical mythology to teaching to AIDS. Throughout my work, though, a personal approach tends to be balanced by a technically formal, decorous manner. The personal voice, withheld by formal technique, talks about education, books, love, teaching, death, elegy. To be a bit more logical about it, love is linked to loss, but loss is healed or redeemed by language, which expresses and fosters love, which is linked to loss. And so on.

My recent work in New York City with people with AIDS has received more journalistic attention than my previous poetry. I ran a poetry workshop at Gay Men's Health Crisis for some six years, and my experiences there continue to nourish my imagination. But then so do my happy childhood, my classical education, my years in Greece or life in New York, my career as a teacher, my being wife and mother, or my rural summers.

The titles of some of my books attest to the sense of loving, losing, giving back, carrying on: A Son from Sleep, The Empty Bed, Pass It On, Unending Dialogues, The Double Legacy.

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Rachel Hadas is a poet whose fine sense of technique matches her sensitivity to both the universal constants and the particular variables of human experience. She is also a poet whose work reflects a profound awareness of the goals and implications of her art. These concerns coalesce in Living in Time, a work that consists of a long poem surrounded by prose essays. The volume's mixed form reflects Hadas's consciousness that she shares a commitment with such writers as Frost and Merrill "to mend the rift between fact and fiction, prose and poetry." Its contents point to three of the central concerns of her work over the years: an awareness of the past and of how it impinges on and merits attention from the present, a sense of the importance and the depth of what is often dismissed as "everyday" experience, and a keen effort to explore the workings of imagination as it simultaneously shapes and guides us through the webs of memory and immediate experience.

The title of her first collection, Starting from Troy, bears out Hadas's consistent belief that "the attempt to write as if writing were an unprecedented action is doomed to failure." Throughout her career her poems have acknowledged precedents both in their richly allusive texture (attempting to make connections with, and not merely allude to, such predecessors as Homer, Sappho, Keats, Beaudelaire, Karyotakis, and Stevens) and in their masterful handling and variation of traditional poetic forms. Thus, a fruitful dialogue between present circumstances and past forms, with their attendant values, unfolds through her use of the sestina for "The Colours of the Place" and of terza rima for "The Lesson of the Elements" and through her "Pantoum on Pumpkin Hill" (all from Slow Transparency). The dialogue continues through the different frameworks offered by the villanelle of "Fix It (Winter)" and by the epistolary style of "Hortus Conclusus" (both from Pass It On).

Hadas has been overly critical of her early work. Characterizing its spirit as one of "distinct powerlessness" ignores too much of its wit and intellectual energy, yet her observations that these poems are "skimpy on connections, whether of narrative or argument," and that "they attempt to capture complex states of mind by excluding a great deal and disguising the rest" show typically sharp critical self-awareness. Poems such as "Village Triptych" (Starting from Troy) and "Alien Corn" (Slow Transparency) achieve a terseness that borders on obscurity by following Auden's early practice of dropping articles and connectives, and Hadas's observation in "Kaleido-scope" (Slow Transparency) that distinct parts "die /to form a pattern" is self-descriptive of the affective cost of such hard-edged poetry. Other early poems, however, also point toward the two means by which Hadas has overcome these limitations: the commitment to everyday experience, and the exploration of the dialogical workings of the imagination, both mentioned above as keystones in her work.

A commitment to everyday experience may be viewed simply as a broadening of the concern for provenance found in Hadas's respect for the past. It is a further way of "stationing oneself in time, at a particular moment," and so one is not surprised to find signs of it in the descriptive fullness of such early poems as "Landlady" (Starting from Troy) and "Siesta in the Summer House" (Slow Transparency). But this emphasis becomes central to the success of Hadas's later collections. The birth of her child, the focus of A Son from Sleep, fundamentally changed her sense of herself and her place in the world, and since her art is so vitally attuned to its maker, the event changed the nature of her art. The sense of connectedness between mother and newborn caught so fully and unsentimentally in "Amnesia, Changes" is embodied in such poems as "In Lieu of Lullaby" with a new wholeness, a directness achieved without loss of lyric concision. Six short lines from "Up and Down" demonstrate both the solid detail and the metaphoric power of Hadas's later work, and their overlapping sounds also embody the interconnectedness of these traits: "Still night sweats /and bleeding still, /its bleachy smell. /Your bleat softly /shears the thick /fleece of dark."

This more broadly responsive style also has roots in the third central feature of Hadas's work, its preoccupation with the imagination's shaping power in the dialogue between inner and outer experience, past and present. It is appropriate that this concern supplies the title for the long poem "The Dream Machine," which is at the center of Living in Time. As with Hadas's focus on everyday experience, one can find anticipations of this emphasis in her early work. "Two Sleepers" (Starting from Troy) and "Dry Season" (Slow Transparency), for example, both depict the rapid changes of inner and outer weather that proceed from the dream machine. Yet it is in Hadas's later poetry that the subtle, shaping continuities (as well as the distortions and limitations) of the imagination receive their most probing and powerful treatment. Thus, "Generations" (Pass It On) turns into poetry a series of close observations on the acquisition and use of language by pursuing the threads of implications through various times and places—what "the baby /points to," what "you /look at," what "we talk of"—with amazed awareness that "the link between imagination and event" can be at once "so weak" and so necessary. The troubling ambiguity of a world "that lasts /because it never was" ("Art") gives a double edge to the title of her volume Mirrors of Astonishment, and yet the heft and brilliance of the blade make the reader echo her response to the rainbow in "Cupfuls of Summer"—"Look! the light!"—and eagerly await more.

—Julia Reibetanz