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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.

Adrienne Rich

I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.
ADRIENNE RICH

Back Carbon Coming Head Keep Know
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
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
ADRIENNE RICH

Monster Sleep Think Thinking Woman
Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
ADRIENNE RICH

Enough Language Longer Personal
Only where there is language is there world.
ADRIENNE RICH

Language Only World
The ocean, whose tides respond, like women’s menses, to the pull of the moon, the ocean which corresponds to the amniotic fluid in which human life begins.
ADRIENNE RICH

Correspond Men's Monsters Moon Ocean Pull Respond Women
Love, our subject: we’ve trained it like ivy to our walls.
ADRIENNE RICH

Love Subject Trained Wall
In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
ADRIENNE RICH

Language Naming Oppression Power Silence Violence World
But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?
ADRIENNE RICH

Children Enter Freedom Man Mother Room Think Travel Wife Work
We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
ADRIENNE RICH

Buyable Life Live Melodrama Memories Nostalgia Salablem Blip Screen Suspense Terrible Terror Way
Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community.
ADRIENNE RICH

Art Community Creative Energy Enormous Hunger Solitude Women Work
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
ADRIENNE RICH

Ambivalence Blissful Gratification Murderous Nerves Resentment Suffering
A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you… where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
ADRIENNE RICH

Burn Desire Kill Living might Poem Remind Revolutionary Theorize Wick
“What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?” Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?
ADRIENNE RICH

Each Explore Other Society Stake Stories Want
When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
ADRIENNE RICH

Carpet Closely Look Multiple Threads Tiny Underside Unseen Weaver
Even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?
ADRIENNE RICH

Angry Darkest Embittered Grief Most Stricken

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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