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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.

Adrienne Rich

To do something very common, in my own way.
ADRIENNE RICH

Common My Own Something Way
The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
ADRIENNE RICH

Bodies Expediency Gaslight Instinct Mind Truth
I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.
ADRIENNE RICH

Gay Organized Poetry Priestly Profession Religion Talking Uncomfortable Use
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
ADRIENNE RICH

False Glamour Longer Mistrust Performance Poverty Theatricality Transcendental
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICH

Absolute Country Failure Imagination People Political Scientific War
I came to explore the wreck.
ADRIENNE RICH

Came Explore Wreck
A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
ADRIENNE RICH

Cutting Enough Flesh Open Ripped Scar
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
ADRIENNE RICH

Born Each Help Helping Knowing Live Somehow Somewhere Tomorrow
A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
ADRIENNE RICH

Country Own Patriotism Soul Wrestles
White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn’t brought up to hate. But hate isn’t the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness.
ADRIENNE RICH

Claim Crime Grew Hate Passion Speech Try White
Only where there is language is there world.
ADRIENNE RICH

Language Only World
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Artist Boundaries Bursting Channel Choiceless Creative Enormous Hunger Merely System Working
Since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
ADRIENNE RICH

Brotherhood Interest Least Loyal Men Own Self Since View World
I think about the possibilities for empathy, for mutual solidarity among gay men and lesbians, not simply as people who suffer under homophobia, but as people who are also extremely creative, active, and have a particular understanding of the human condition.
ADRIENNE RICH

Gay Lesbian Men People Possibilities Solidarity Suffer Thinking
To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
ADRIENNE RICH

Home Scenery Suffer Suffering
It takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.
ADRIENNE RICH

Demanding Individual Nonbeing Resist Strength Void

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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