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Even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

Adrienne Rich

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

Create Fearfully Impulse Real Silence Terribly Tunnel Voice
A huge breast, an avid cave; between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth; on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
ADRIENNE RICH

Avid Breast Cave Exist Grass Helpless Huge Leg Martyred Purpose Snake Son Swamp Teeth
It requires enormous commitment like any art. But there’s a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It’s the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.
ADRIENNE RICH

Art Come Committed Desire Economic Enormous Institution Poetry Require Social
Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others.
ADRIENNE RICH

Betrayed Caricature Electronic Mass Media Other People Target
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
The women’s movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked.
ADRIENNE RICH

Apparated Asking Crucial Movement Political Voice Women
Even where love has run thin the child’s soul musters strength… the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
ADRIENNE RICH

Children Love Loving Past Purpose Run Running Rush Soul Worth
If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alternatives Challenges Experience Imagination Imagine Question
What it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.
ADRIENNE RICH

Another Body Live Ourselves Sense Skin Surpass
We’ve learned a lot from the great psychologists. Wilhelm Reich wrote about the relationship between fascism and sexual repression.
ADRIENNE RICH

Fascism Great Group Learned People Psychologist Relationship Repression Sexual Support Wrote
It is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.
ADRIENNE RICH

Destructiveness Dominated Male Refusal Self Society
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 RICH

Country Incomprehension Institution Male Political Power Real Speaking
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.’”
ADRIENNE RICH

Artist Dishonoured Honor Legal People President
It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism.
ADRIENNE RICH

Important Long Optimism Pessimism Possess Term
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
Poetry can add its grain to an accumulation of consciousness against the idea that there is no alternative – that we’re just in the great flow of capitalism and it can never be any different – that this is human destiny, this is human nature.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alternative Consciousness Destiny Flow Grain Idea

Even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

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Even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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