It requires enormous commitment like any art. But there’s a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It’s the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.
ADRIENNE RICHIn the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment – not just in poetry – into the personal.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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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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Poetry 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.
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
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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.
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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.
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Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation.
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It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
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Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.
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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.
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The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
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That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.
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The more I live, the more I think, two people together is a miracle.
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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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The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.
ADRIENNE RICH