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.
ADRIENNE RICHUntil we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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I came to explore the wreck.
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In a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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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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I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.
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To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously.
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if we are unaware that women even have a history–we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
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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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It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
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[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who – for whatever reasons – are less conscious of what they are living through.
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To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
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Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
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It’s been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.
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Whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
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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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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.
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Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
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Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single “I” or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.
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You have to give your art everything you can – I don’t mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
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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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Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
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What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power.
ADRIENNE RICH