Jean Valentine is the author of nine books of poetry, most recently Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 (Wesleyan, 2004), winner of the National Book Award. She received the Poetry Society of America???s Shelley Memorial Prize in 2000.
I’ve known Adrienne Rich, in her work, since 1952, when I was eighteen. I was walking down Garden Street, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one day in my first weeks at Radcliffe College, when a kindly old gentleman spoke to me, and as we talked...