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When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet

Adrienne Rich

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

Artist Boundaries Bursting Channel Choiceless Creative Enormous Hunger Merely System Working
How we dwelt in two worlds the daughters and the mothers in the kingdom of the sons.
ADRIENNE RICH

Daughter Dwelt Kingdom Mother Son World
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
Across the curve of the earth, there are women getting up before dawn, in the blackness before the point of light, in the twilight before sunrise; there are women rising earlier than men and children to break the ice, to start the stove, to put up the pap.
ADRIENNE RICH

Blackness Children Dawn Light Running Twilight Women
Any woman’s death diminishes me.
ADRIENNE RICH

Death Diminish Diminishes Woman
Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.
ADRIENNE RICH

Dried Drop Dust Grief Heart Lip Refused River Wear
I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
ADRIENNE RICH

Different Guess Mine Sew Skin Stitch Together
The unconscious wants truth, as the body does. The complexity and fecundity of dreams come from the complexity and fecundity of the unconscious struggling to fulfill that desire. The complexity and fecundity of poetry come from the same struggle.
ADRIENNE RICH

Body Complexity Desire Dream Fecundity Struggle Struggling Truth Unconcious
The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
ADRIENNE RICH

Beauty Darkness Let See
If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
ADRIENNE RICH

Ceased Day Exist Immediately Poetry Reinvented Same
That a war can be represented as helping a people to ‘feel good’ about themselves, or their country, is a measure of that failure.
ADRIENNE RICH

Country Failure Feel Good Helping Measure Represented Themselves War
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 RICH

Concentration Language ower Poetry Power Relationship Ultimate Universe
These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
ADRIENNE RICH

Bear Destruction Longer Scar Witness
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
Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
ADRIENNE RICH

Feeling Guileless Intolerance Myself Selfishness Sometimes
What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.
ADRIENNE RICH

Century Coming Country Culture Different Discerned Poetic Role Social Together Voice

When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet

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When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet

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