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That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.

Adrienne Rich

Mothers and daughters have always exchanged with each other – beyond the verbally transmitted lore of female survival.
ADRIENNE RICH

Beyond Daughter Exchanged Female Mother Survival Transmitted Two Verbally
The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.
ADRIENNE RICH

Deepest Estrangement Material Most Mutuality Painful
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Conscious Cutting Interval Light Profane Revelation Self Stopped Time
“Global culture” is of course not a culture: it’s the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.
ADRIENNE RICH

Commodity Culture Image Imposing Interest Marketing
We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation.
ADRIENNE RICH

Control Greed Little May Poem Power Technological
Show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.
ADRIENNE RICH

Beauty Invisible Made Outlawed Possible Remind Represented Seem Separation Show
When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders … then I began to wonder
ADRIENNE RICH

Becoming Border Correct Dream Escaping Political Politically Showed Sign
The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
ADRIENNE RICH

Body Erected Patriarchy Terrain Woman
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
When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
ADRIENNE RICH

Authority Disequilibrium Mirror Moment Psychic Teacher World
A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
ADRIENNE RICH

Cutting Enough Flesh Open Ripped Scar
When someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing. Yet you know you exist and others like you, that this is a game with mirrors.
ADRIENNE RICH

Authority Describe Disequilibrium Individual Strength Mirror Physic Teacher World
Women’s Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
ADRIENNE RICH

Challenge Compensatory Freedom Intellectual Nonexclusionary Political Simply Structure Studies Women
Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
ADRIENNE RICH

Enough Language Longer Personal
So endlessly, still expecting to be believed. We are accustomed to the contempt inherent in the political lie.
ADRIENNE RICH

Accustomed Believed Contempt Endlessly Expecting Inherent Lie Political Still
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICH

Absolute Country Failure Imagination People Political Scientific War

That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.

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That’s why I want to speak to you now. To say: no person, trying to take responsibility for her or his identity, should have to be so alone.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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