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What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?– You yourself must change it.

Adrienne Rich

Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations.
ADRIENNE RICH

Cloning Laboratories Live Nuclear Pipeline Power Radioactivity Real Street Switchboard Telephone
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
Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected – pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.
ADRIENNE RICH

Art Connected Isolation Literature Loneliness People Sex
When men – insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea – have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included
ADRIENNE RICH

Children Dangerous Embodiment Idea Loving Man Other Patriarchal Themselves
We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.
ADRIENNE RICH

Consciousness Grandmother Market Ourselves Toughness Unacceptable Women
The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.
ADRIENNE RICH

Assumption Culture Men Patriarchy Real Subgroup Women World
The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
ADRIENNE RICH

Body Complexity Desire Dream Fecundity Struggle Struggling Truth Unconcious
I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
ADRIENNE RICH

Different Guess Mine Sew Skin Stitch Together
Just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.
ADRIENNE RICH

Aware Bridge Driving Hill Icy Intersection Steep Symbol Traffic Unconsciously
Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
ADRIENNE RICH

Dried Drop Dust Grief Heart Lip Refused River Wear
Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alternative Consciousness Destiny Flow Grain Idea
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
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
The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits.
ADRIENNE RICH

Culture Fact Important Imprint Limit Notable Sense
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Breaking Comprise Compulsory Existence Heterosexuality Lesbian Life Male Rejection Taboo
Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem.
ADRIENNE RICH

Breath Colon Double Indication Metrically Musical Notation Pause Slash Sound Space Urgency

What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?– You yourself must change it.

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What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other’s despair into hope?– You yourself must change it.

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Popular Authors

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