One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
ADRIENNE RICHPoetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
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The moment of change is the only poem.
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Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem.
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An honorable human relationship- that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love”- is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.
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There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
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In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment – not just in poetry – into the personal.
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What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
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We have lived with violence far too long.
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If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
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and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.
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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.
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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
ADRIENNE RICH