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 RICHWriters 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.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking; a marble brow.
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Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we’re not young.
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The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.
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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
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Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work.
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I came to explore the wreck.
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and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.
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Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling.
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A language is a map of our failures.
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That primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.
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I’ve had to guess at her, sewing her skin together as I sew mine, though with a different stitch
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The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist’s concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.
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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.
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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
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I’d call it love if love didn’t take so many years but lust too is a jewel.
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It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.
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Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.
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The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
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I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don’t mean that everyone can write poetry – it’s an art, a craft.
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It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
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If you are trying to transform a brutalized society into one where people can live in dignity and hope, you begin with the empowering of the most powerless. You build from the ground up.
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As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.
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To do something very common, in my own way.
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I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons.
ADRIENNE RICH