Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present.
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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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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The longer I live the more I mistrust theatricality, the false glamour cast by performance, the more I know its poverty beside the truths we are salvaging from the splitting-open of our lives. -from “Transcendental Etude
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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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Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
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“Global culture” is of course not a culture: it’s the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.
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So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
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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.
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A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
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No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
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Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.
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Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
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We need to imagine a world in which every woman is the presiding genius of her own body.
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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
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I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICH