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It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.

Adrienne Rich

A book of poems doesn’t just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.
ADRIENNE RICH

Book Chance Distribute Editor never Poem Select
The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
ADRIENNE RICH

Citizen Class Generation Grief Magnet National Race Relationship Wall War
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICH

Failure Imagination Political Scientific War
I long to create something that can’t be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
ADRIENNE RICH

Create Every Joined Keep Knowledge Long Passive Pipe Plumbing Script Something Used Writing
Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
ADRIENNE RICH

Knew Mother Nothing Prepared Realization State Uncertain
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
This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
ADRIENNE RICH

Errant One Orphaned Own Seem Sporadic Thinking Tradition Way Women Work
The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power.
ADRIENNE RICH

Believe Fear Necessity Poetry Power Reason Trying
Change is not a threat to your life, but an invitation to live.
ADRIENNE RICH

Change Invitation Live Threat
Only where there is language is there world.
ADRIENNE RICH

Language Only World
Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
ADRIENNE RICH

Hard Learning Mean Refusing Responsibility Strong Thinking Women Work
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
ADRIENNE RICH

Break Human Important Isolation Justice
Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants.
ADRIENNE RICH

Brain Burn Deviant Girl Grammar Men Message Norm Standard Thinking Young
What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
ADRIENNE RICH

Century Coming Country Culture Different Discerned Poetic Role Social Together Voice
But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.
ADRIENNE RICH

Envying Imagination Imagine Place Possibilities Struggle Survival Unresigned
One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women’s choices concerning childbirth.
ADRIENNE RICH

Birth Code Cultural Giving Law Professional Religious

It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.

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It is as though the risks of the poet’s existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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