Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem.
ADRIENNE RICHFor now, poetry has the capacity – in its own ways and by its own means – to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
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Responsibility to yourself means that you don’t fall for shallow and easy solutions-it means that you refuse to sell your talents and aspirations short.
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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.
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Every poem breaks a silence that had to be overcome.
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When someone, let’s say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it’s like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
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The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see.
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Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him.
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To become a token woman – whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters – is to become something less than a man.
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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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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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.
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You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it.
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I cannot speak for you. Two thoughts: there is no liberation that only knows how to say ‘I’; there is no collective movement that speaks for each of us all the way through.
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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
ADRIENNE RICH