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We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.

Adrienne Rich

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
Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.
ADRIENNE RICH

Art Artifice Cheating Honesty Truth
I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
ADRIENNE RICH

Body Instrument Mind relief Shape Trying
To allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers.
ADRIENNE RICH

Answer Carnal Charted Impermeable Ordinary Pierce Reading Right Routine Safe
The mind’s passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
ADRIENNE RICH

Another Mind Obscurity Passion Singling Tale
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics.
ADRIENNE RICH

Arctic Deaadnededness Dead Doors Key Leftism Male Politics Revolution Tolerance Word
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Hard Learning Mean Refusing Responsibility Strong Thinking Women Work
The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
ADRIENNE RICH

Begin Body Change Mind Will
We assume that politicians are without honor. We read their statements trying to crack the code. The scandals of their politics: not so much that men in high places lie, only that they do so with such indifference.
ADRIENNE RICH

Code Crack Honor Lie Lying Men Place Political Politician Politics Scandal Statement
It takes some strength of soul–and not just individual strength, but collective understanding–to resist this void, this nonbeing, into which are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard.
ADRIENNE RICH

Demanding Individual Nonbeing Resist Strength Void
The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.
ADRIENNE RICH

Fermenting Intellectual Interest Kind Moral People Poetry Political Sensual Sexual Together
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.
ADRIENNE RICH

Alone Disturb Enrapture Monster Monstrous People Speak Themselves
A life I didn’t choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
ADRIENNE RICH

Choose Even Life One Tool Wrong
The vixen I met at twilight on Route 5 south of Willoughby: long dead. She was an omen to me, surviving, herding her cubs in the silvery bend of the road in nineteen sixty-five.
ADRIENNE RICH

Cub Dead Herding Long Nineteen Omen Survive Twilight Vixen
You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming.
ADRIENNE RICH

Free Hate Night Nothing Notion Play Sacred Writing
I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.
ADRIENNE RICH

Born Each Help Helping Knowing Live Somehow Somewhere Tomorrow

We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.

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We lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo’s Women’s War.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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