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 RICHResponsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother’s; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
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It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.
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I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can’t afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’
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It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.
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Waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
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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 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.
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There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice…In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.
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We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.
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The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.
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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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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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It requires enormous commitment like any art. But there’s a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It’s the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.
ADRIENNE RICH