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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

Adrienne Rich

False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news False history gets written every day … the lesbian archaeologist watches herself sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing, asking the clay all questions but her own.
ADRIENNE RICH

Clay Day Every False History Watches Written
The moment of change is the only poem.
ADRIENNE RICH

Change Healing Moment Poem Poetry
But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
ADRIENNE RICH

Bodies Body Mind Mother Women
Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single “I” or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.
ADRIENNE RICH

Coming Imagine Increasingly Poetry Position Theatre Thinking Voice
Language is power… Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
ADRIENNE RICH

Changing Language Mean Reality Writing
[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who – for whatever reasons – are less conscious of what they are living through.
ADRIENNE RICH

Endowed Gift Language Reason Risk Speak Survival Use
Whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?
ADRIENNE RICH

Connectedness Creativity Human Love Sense Sexually
The assumption that women are a subgroup, that men’s culture is the ‘real’ world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the ‘great’ or ‘liberalizing’ periods of history have been the same for women as for men.
ADRIENNE RICH

Assumption Culture Men Patriarchy Real Subgroup Women World
I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alive Born Delight Extraneous Giving Offered
To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.
ADRIENNE RICH

Adapt Conquer Cultural Degrade Fullness Intention Meaning Passive
If I cling to circumstances I could feel not responsible. Only she who says she did not choose, is the loser in the end.
ADRIENNE RICH

Choose Circumstance End Feel Loser Responsible
When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart.
ADRIENNE RICH

Around Block Building Collapse Landscape Memories Notebook Prayer
What we see, we see and seeing is changing
ADRIENNE RICH

Changing See Seeing
All new learning looks at first like chaos.
ADRIENNE RICH

Chaos First Learning Look New
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness.
ADRIENNE RICH

Children Experience Exquisite Feeling Most Suffering
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Accuracy Arpeggioor Breaking Chance Daring Down Faulting Fugue Leap Practising Sentence Strnghland Transcendence

Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

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Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.

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