Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
ADRIENNE RICHAnd that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative.
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
ADRIENNE RICH -
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.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Passion for survival is the great theme of women’s poetry.
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Made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language – this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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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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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There is no ‘the truth’,’a truth’ – truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.
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The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.
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Practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
ADRIENNE RICH