Adrienne Rich’s Poetry and Prose Quizzes

Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose Quiz

1 Which of the following is *not* an accurate description of Rich's career?
Her poetry evolved alongside her life experience

She stuck to one style for all of her life

Beginning in the 1970s, her work was recognized for it feminist ideals

Her work featured increasingly progressive themes
2 Which of the following did *not* influence Rich's career?
Her experiences as a wife and mother

Her brother's untimely death

Her identification as a lesbian

Her political activism
3 Which of Rich's volumes won the National Book Award?
Diving into the Wreck

Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law

Blood, Bread, and Poetry

A Change of World
4 Why did Rich decline to accept the National Book Award on her own?
To protest American politics

To share it with other female authors

She was too sick to receive it in person

She disapproved of the other winners
5 Acccording to Rich, what is necessary for political change?
The end of the electoral college

Get-out-the-vote drives

The removal of dark money from politics

Community and collective action
6 What does Rich argue in "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" ?
That lesbians are too visible

That heterosexuality is not necessarily most women's sexual preference

That everyone should be heterosexual

That the gay rights movement has become too inclusive
7 How can we interpet the title of "A Dream of a Common Language"?
Rich dreams that everyone begins to speak Esperanto

Rich dreams that everyone begins to speak English

Rich dreams that poetry might be able to connect and speak to everyone

It refers to a dream Rich had after her ex-husband's death
8 Which of the following is not one of Rich's themes?
The Oedipal complex

Feminism

Power

LGBTQ+ rights
9 How does Rich view received history?
A facutal record of the past

The product of careful work by scholars and journalists

Inaccuate, leaving out much of the truth

A conspiracy
10 What does Rich mean in the lines "Tonight I think no poetry will serve"?
Rich experience a long period of writer's block

Poetry cannot accurately convey some emotions, like intense love

Poetry cannot be bent to the poet's will

Poetry is not a servile art that represents the view of the ruling class
11 Why might Rich compare the contemporary world to a shipwreck in "Diving into the Wreck"?
She wants to emphasize that people are like ships passing in the night

There is pervasive inequality in 20th-century America

There's a lot we don't understand, so the world could be seen as "underwater"

She wants to compare contemporary politics to piracy and war
12 From what perspective do most of Rich's poem speak?
First person

Second person

Through dialogue

Third person
13 Which of the following is *not* a formal feature of Rich's poetry?
repeating lines, as in pantoums and villanelles

free verse

enjambment

blank spaces
14 Which of the following symbols does not appear in Rich's poetry?
White rooms

The colossus

Tigers

Radium
15 Why does Rich focus on Marie Curie's research into Radium?
Radium both gave Curie her power and killed her, reflecting on the nature of power

She wishes to show the dangers of technological progress

It is an anti-nuclearization poem

She wishes to shed light on this largely unrecognized female scientist
16 For Rich, what is the role of poetry?
To record the poet's personal life

To confess and expunge ugly, self-hating thoughts

To connect people and inspire them to political action

To record historical events
17 How can we intepret the tigers in "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers"?
They are symbols for liberated women

They reveal women's ability to blend in with their surroundings

They are a symbol of the fight against climate change

They show the inherent violence of all men
18 When did Adrienne Rich die?
2019

She is still alive

1912

2012
19 What does Rich mean when she says "No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness"?
Institiutions were not built to include women, and still exclude them

Women are not fit to be included in departments that study the history of consciousness

Women must work harder to understand the history of Western thought

Women can only be insiders if they understand masculine consciousness
20 Why is Rich skeptical of the development of technology?
She had an allergy to electricity

She belives poetry should be written with pen and paper

It cuts generations off from one another

She fears the singularity
21 Describe Rich's religious background
Both her parents were Christian

She warn born to a Jewish father and a Christian mother

She was a Buddhist for all her life

She espouses atheism as the only logical system of thinking
22 Which of the following prizes did Rich reject for political reasons?
National Medal of Arts

The National Book Award

The Pulitzer Prize

A Guggenheim Fellowship
23 Which of the following was not one of Rich's identities?
Lesbian

Person of Color

Culturally Jewish

Feminist
24 With whom does the poet identify in "Diving into the Wreck?"
Jacques Costeau

Her mother

Marie Curie

A mermaid and merman
25 What is the purposes of the blank spaces in Rich's lines of poetry?
To provide the reader room to reflect or to emphasize a gap in meaning

To pay homage to Emily Dickinson's dashes

To mimic the holes in a corset

To create the effect of a stutter