There’s been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I’m speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing.
ADRIENNE RICHThey can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide…?
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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To allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I am a feminist because I feel endangered, psychically and physically, by this society and because I believe that the women’s movement is saying that we have come to an edge of history.
ADRIENNE RICH -
We might possess every technological resource… but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless.
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How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying.
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I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.
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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 -
It’s exhilarating to be alive in a time of awakening consciousness; it can also be confusing, disorienting, and painful.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
ADRIENNE RICH -
One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
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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Some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand–a center of gravity.
ADRIENNE RICH -
It’s as if, in the mother’s eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:’You are there!’
ADRIENNE RICH