Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
ADRIENNE RICHIf poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.
More Adrienne Rich Quotes
-
-
I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class.
ADRIENNE RICH -
TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The impulse to create begins – often terribly and fearfully – in a tunnel of silence.
ADRIENNE RICH -
The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual – all of that fermenting together.
ADRIENNE RICH -
Lying is done with words and also with silence.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.’”
ADRIENNE RICH -
All new learning looks at first like chaos.
ADRIENNE RICH -
A knowledge that is subliminal, subversive, preverbal: the knowledge flowing between two alike bodies, one of which has spent nine months inside the other.
ADRIENNE RICH -
There being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence
ADRIENNE RICH -
When men – insofar as they are embodiments of the patriarchal idea – have become dangerous to children and other living things, themselves included
ADRIENNE RICH -
I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralyzed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives.
ADRIENNE RICH -
I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something – a great deal – to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing.
ADRIENNE RICH -
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 -
Behind all art is an element of desire…Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art.
ADRIENNE RICH -
In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded – here I am speaking of the U.S. – while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school.
ADRIENNE RICH