the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
ADRIENNE RICHWomen have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community.
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Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other.
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Not biology, but ignorance of ourselves, has been the key to our powerlessness
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A knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.
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It is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which ‘sexism’ is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed ‘patrivincialism’ or patrochialism.
ADRIENNE RICH -
So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference.
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I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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.
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I came to explore the wreck.
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Reality, the oppressor’s tongue.
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My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.
ADRIENNE RICH