But nothing less than the most radical imagination will carry us beyond this place, beyond the mere struggle for survival, to that lucid recognition of our possibilities which will keep us impatient, and unresigned to mere survival.
ADRIENNE RICHWhat I’m finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written – out of and amid the dysfunction.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it’s the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.
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A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
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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 keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.
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Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
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Re-vision — the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
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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.
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We can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class.
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Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother … when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
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The moment of change is the only poem.
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What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.
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The most notable fact that our culture imprints on women is a sense of our limits.
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The woman’s body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.
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There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.
ADRIENNE RICH