What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
ADRIENNE RICHThe 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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded – here I am speaking of the U.S. – while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school.
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Experience is always larger than language.
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… this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being
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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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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
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A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
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What we see, we see and seeing is changing
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In a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing; it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.
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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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They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide…?
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All new learning looks at first like chaos.
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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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It is unstable and threatening as the earth is not; it spawns new life daily, yet swallows up lives; it is changeable like the moon, unregulated, yet indestructible and eternal.
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We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.
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I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
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Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work.
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One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else.
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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
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Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
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If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell?
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The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
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You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
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The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones.
ADRIENNE RICH