The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.
ADRIENNE RICHI do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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There’s been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I’m speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing.
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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
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The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap.
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I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
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When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
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There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice…In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow.
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
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If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling.
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When a woman tells the truth she is creating the possibility for more truth around her.
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One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else.
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It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women’s bodies by men.
ADRIENNE RICH -
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day … the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.
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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
ADRIENNE RICH -
Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Or those who still believe that language is ‘only words’ and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
ADRIENNE RICH