In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
ADRIENNE RICHThere 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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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What we see, we see and seeing is changing
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow.
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
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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.
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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.
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Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
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To allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers.
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Whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
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The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.
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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.
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Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
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“Support” groups for every kind of human condition, where, in the clichés of that milieu, people “share” and “heal,” the question, “What for?”, “What now?” is no longer asked.
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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
ADRIENNE RICH