Tonight No Poetry Will Serve

Tonight No Poetry Will Serve is a collection of poems written between 2007 and 2010 by Adrienne Rich, a celebrated American poet, essayist, educator, feminist, and political activist. Tonight No Poetry Will Serve is the final volume of Rich’s poetry, published in 2011 a year before her death at the age of 82. Rich is considered one of the most respected and influential poets of the late twentieth century. Her essays and poems are widely read and studied, and she has won many prestigious literary awards including the National Book Award for Poetry. In 1997, she declined the National Medal for the Arts, instead, expressing her anger with the growing imbalance of power and justice in society and her disagreement with the government’s plan to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Of Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, Rich declared, “I believe almost everything I know, have come to understand, is somewhere in this book.”

In the collection, Rich returns to themes that have informed her works throughout her career. An ardent anti-war and women’s rights activist, Rich was also a champion of the LGBTQ+ community’s struggle for recognition and equality. Equally important to Rich is the process of female identity formation and the fight for female liberation. The poems in this volume express Rich’s outrage against war, poverty, and the oppressive patriarchy. Here, Rich conflates the personal, the political, and the poetic in her quest for social justice. In an interview with The Paris Review about the collection, Rich explains that her thinking and writing have been “charting its way over many decades, formed in many ways,” making Tonight No Poetry Will Serve a culmination of her work.

Stylistically, Rich is known for her use of free verse and poetic dialogue. To The Paris Review, Rich expressed that the “pull and release of voices” and the “music, the sound of words working together” had always mattered to her, as does the power—or potential impotence—of language. Rich’s poems often employ enjambment: the carrying over a thought or phrase into the next line. Her poems typically have irregular line and stanza lengths. Rich also frequently incorporates literary allusions and quotes. A back-matter section of “Notes on the Poems” details the literary references present in Tonight No Poetry Will Serve.



The collection, which is divided into six sections, is prefaced with an epigraph from Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language: the multifaced definition of the verb “serve.” The opening poem, “Waiting in the Rain, for Music,” describes a person in a subway car, scribbling “contraband calligraphy against the war / poetry wages against itself.” Rich explains that poetry “without a critical social vision” makes peace sound too easy and war too morally simple. In “Turbulence” Rich compares life’s struggle to the rough motion in an airplane, writing “You’re / designed to tremble too. / Else break / Higher you climb, trouble in mind.”

The title poem, “Tonight No Poetry Will Serve” concludes the first section. It begins with a description of a loved one, first walking barefoot, looking at the new moon, then a vision of her “sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair / asleep but not oblivious / of the unslept unsleeping / elsewhere.” The speaker concedes, however, that “Tonight I think / no poetry / will serve.” The poem changes abruptly from sensual and lyrical to tersely abrupt with the line “Syntax of rendition.” The word rendition defines the act of covertly interrogating a prisoner in a country that has fewer regulations on their humane treatment. Rich comments to The Paris Review that this poem was “inflected” by interviews she heard about prisoners being tortured and waterboarded in Guantanamo. Rich says, “No poetry can serve to mitigate such acts.” The poem ends with the line “now diagram the sentence.”

“Scenes of Negotiation,” a poem about institutional power and protest, comprises the second section. In the third section, “From Sickbed Shores” addresses the plight of the oppressed around the world, “(sick body in a sick country: can it get well?)” and urges the reader not to be “sheathed in indifference,” but to speak out against torture and oppression.



The fourth section of the book is a series of poems about Axel Avákar, a “fictive poet, counter-muse, brother.” He is a “boy-/comrade who would love / everything I loved.” According to Rich, the poem was inspired by a dream she had reading a long scroll signed with the name Axel Avákar. Rich describes the poems to The Paris Review as a one-sided dialogue between two figures who were once close, that is full of “missed dialogues, lost opportunities, danger, the question of who can rescue whom.”

“Ballade of the Poverties” is one of the notable poems in section five. Rich confronts the reader with a graphic listing of images of poverty: “There’s the poverty of the cockroach kingdom and the rusted toilet bowl / The poverty of to steal food for the first time…the poverty /cleaning up the puke…There’s the poverty of labor offered silently on the curb.” The speaker addresses the “Princes” of predation and finance and weaponry, those who travel by private jet, who “will never learn through words.” She offers them a mirror by which to learn.

The final section of Tonight No Poetry Will Serve consists of two poems. In the first, “You, Again,” the speaker addresses New York City, saying she didn’t ask to “parse its idioms of littered / parking lots” in dreams searching for the buildings she used to live in. Finally, “Powers of Recuperation,” offers a closing glimmer of hope for the future of society with the phrase “All new learning looks at first / like chaos.” In the poem, a woman of the citizen party, an “incendiary woman,” walks through a bleak city, but ponders with “glowing eyes and / skirted knees apart,” what can yet be built.