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It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple

Adrienne Rich

Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.
ADRIENNE RICH

Country Poets have Unravelling Violent Wonderful
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Believe Choice Help Keep Language Life Move Paralysed Respect
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
The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
ADRIENNE RICH

Begin Body Change Mind Will
Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.
ADRIENNE RICH

Betrayed Caricature Electronic Mass Media Other People Target
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Belief Depended Dreamlife Intelligent Mean Multiple Choice Physical Reading Sensation Swirl
I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There’s always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two.
ADRIENNE RICH

Connection Going Isolated Kind Mean Movement Thinking Two
Or those who still believe that language is ‘only words’ and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
ADRIENNE RICH

Believe Description Language Old Transform
If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
ADRIENNE RICH

Begin Brutalized Dignity Empowering Hope People Powerless Society Transform Trying
It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’
ADRIENNE RICH

Children Day Eye Message Mothers Smile Stroking Read Touch
Abortion is violence; a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon, first of all, herself.
ADRIENNE RICH

Abortion Deep Desperate First Herself Violence Woman
To do something very common, in my own way.
ADRIENNE RICH

Common My Own Something Way
Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
ADRIENNE RICH

Cost Forcibly Heterosexuality Imposed Poverty Subliminally Woman
I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
ADRIENNE RICH

Choose Intelligence Love Splitting Time
The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps-no casual storytelling jogged by daily life.
ADRIENNE RICH

Casual Daily Danger Flow Forgetting Generation Grandchildren Jogged Life Lying Memories Storytelling Trick
A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement, for instance, becoming “support-groups” or therapy groups.
ADRIENNE RICH

Collective Consciousness Need Solution Support Value Withdrawal

It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple

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It will take all your heart, it will take all your breath It will be short, it will not be simple

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