List of Adrienne Rich Quotes

What I Discerned In The U.s. Was A Convergence Of Poetic Voices Coming From Many Different Rents In The Social Fabric, Many Cultures, Many Tributaries, Which, Together, Make Up The American Poetry Of The Late Twentieth Century.

Over Many Years So Many Poets Have Touched My Imagination And Opened Paths For Me - It Hardly Makes Sense To List Them. I Have Always Read A Great Deal Of Poetry.

What I Search For Continuously In My Art Is Adequate Language, Language I Hope Can Stand Beyond Any Particular Occasion. What I'm Finding Is That In Our Increasingly Dysfunctional U.s. Society, Marvelous Poetry Is Being Written - Out Of And Amid The Dysfunction.

Despair, When Not The Response To Absolute Physical And Moral Defeat Is, Like War, The Failure Of Imagination.

In The Middle-class United States, A Veneer Of "alternative Lifestyles" Disguises The Reality That, Here As Everywhere, Women's Apparent "choices" Whether Or Not To Have Children Are Still Dependent On The Far From Neutral Will Of Male Legislators, Jurists, A Male Medical And Pharmaceutical Profession, Well-financed Lobbies, Including The Prelates Of The Catholic Church, And The Political Reality That Women Do Not As Yet Have Self-determination Over Our Bodies And Still Live Mostly In Ignorance Of Our Authentic Physicality, Our Possible Choices, Our Eroticism Itself.

To Read As If Your Life Depended On It Would Mean To Let Into Your Reading Your Beliefs, The Swirl Of Your Dreamlife, The Physical Sensations Of Your Ordinary Carnal Life; And Simultaneously, 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, The So-called Multiple-choice Examination Sheet With The Number 2 Pencil To Mark One Choice And One Choice Only?

The Liar Leads An Existence Of Unutterable Loneliness.

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.

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.

What We See, We See And Seeing Is Changing

The Word Revolution Itself Has Become Not Only A Dead Relic Of Leftism, But A Key To The Deadendedness Of Male Politics: The Revolution Of A Wheel Which Returns In The End To The Same Place; The Revolving Door Of A Politics Which Has Liberated Women Only To Use Them, And Only Within The Limits Of Male Tolerance.

War Is An Absolute Failure Of Imagination, Scientific And Political.