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 RICHThe liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
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The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power.
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The moment of change is the only poem.
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I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from “Splittings
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Language is power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
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I came to explore the wreck.
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You have to give your art everything you can – I don’t mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.
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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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If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
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We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.
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Behind all art is an element of desire…Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art.
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he ocean on whose surface vessels (personified as female) can ride but in whose depth sailors meet their death and monsters conceal themselves.
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Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity.
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Only where there is language is there world.
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A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.’”
ADRIENNE RICH






