Twitter mourns feminist poet Adrienne Rich

News of the death of American poet Adrienne Rich reverberated across Twitter, becoming a top globally trending topic just moments after it was first tweeted.

The news broke on Twitter before it was published by any mainstream media.

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Given Twitter’s propensity for killing off high-profile people on regular occasions, it’s hardly surprising that some were unwilling to invest too much emotion in the news until it was confirmed by an official news source:

When the Rich’s passing was eventually confirmed, a number of Twitter users quoted her works, with her poem “Diving into the Wreck” a particular favourite:

Born in 1929, Rich was variously a poet, academic, activist, and essayist. Her increasing involvement with radical political movements in the late 1960s, in part, led to her divorce from Alfred Haskell Conrad, an economics professor at Harvard University.

In 1976, she began her life-long relationship with Jamaican-born novelist and editor Michelle Cliff.

For Rich, lesbianism was apparently a personal as well political issue. In Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, she explains how “the suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.”

Rich died at her home in Santa Cruz, California. Her son Pablo Conrad told the LA Times that her death resulted from long-term rheumatoid arthritis.

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