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The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.

Adrienne Rich

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
ADRIENNE RICH

Dream Know Like Poem Put
This is one of the ways in which women’s work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own.
ADRIENNE RICH

Errant One Orphaned Own Seem Sporadic Thinking Tradition Way Women Work
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Assumption Drenched Identity Knowledge More Ourselves Refusal Search Women
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Since Time Week Wrap Years Missing Young
To “see the light” too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
ADRIENNE RICH

Darkness Found Light Rejecting Treasure
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Art Artist Channel Clogged Concern Song Struggle Woman
For now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
ADRIENNE RICH

Capacity Forbidden Mean Remind Something Trying Way Woman
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Aquifer Collective History Rupture Secret Spiritual Voice
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else.
ADRIENNE RICH

Biography Censored Collection Image Letter Lying Memories Omitted Undepiched Unnamed
White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn’t brought up to hate. But hate isn’t the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness.
ADRIENNE RICH

Claim Crime Grew Hate Passion Speech Try White
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
ADRIENNE RICH

Ambivalence Blissful Gratification Murderous Nerves Resentment Suffering
The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
ADRIENNE RICH

Create Fearfully Impulse Real Silence Terribly Tunnel Voice
The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
ADRIENNE RICH

Citizen Class Generation Grief Magnet National Race Relationship Wall War
False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news.
ADRIENNE RICH

Day Historical History New News Truth
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
ADRIENNE RICH

Failure Imagination Political Scientific War
If poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
ADRIENNE RICH

Ceased Day Exist Immediately Poetry Reinvented Same

The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.

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The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.

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