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Adrienne Rich

152 quotes

“Dear and cherished graduates: Remember the youth of your generation. Remember all the youths-and the parents who are not here today nor at any commencement in the land. Remember that our true democracy cannot come to birth without their participation. Nor without yours.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have never believed that poetry is an escape from history, and I do not think it is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary. (Preface)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where every public decision has to be justified in the scales of corporate profits, poetry unsettles these apparently self-evident propositions-not through ideology, but by its very presence and ways of being, its embodiment of states of longing and desire. (Preface)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“poetry is always being created anew, in new places, by unforetold hands and voices. In this, it is like the many movements against demoralizing power. We don't know where either will come from. This is a story without an end. (Preface)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination. (p17, III: "What would we create?")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts. A distaste for the political dimensions of art, in this time and place, is a dangerous luxury. (p161, XIX: "The transgressor mother")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, readings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence. (XI: "A Leak in History")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's Black History Month. But this is white history. White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness-that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic. (XXI: "The distance between language and violence" p 181)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire. (XXVIII: "What if")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any truly revolutionary art is an alchemy through which waste, greed, brutality, frozen indifference, blind sorrow and anger are transmuted into some drenching recognition of the What if?-the possible...Revolutionary art dwells, by its nature, on edges. This is its power: the tension between subject and means, between the is and what can be. (XXVIII: "What if")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. 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. ("When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be. (from "Women and Honor: Some Notes on Lying")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most biographers of women still fail to recognize that a woman's central relationship can be to her work, even as lovers come and go. ("Raya Dunayevskaya's Marx")”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think I've brought figures of resistance into my poetry for quite a while-going back to the voice of Mary Wollstonecraft in "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" (1960). History has always felt to me an immense resource for art, and poetry as a place where history can be kept alive-not grand master narratives, but otherwise forgotten or erased people and actions. In the 1970s we were rediscovering women whose lives had been dropped out of history or distorted, like Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Emily Dickinson, Marie Curie, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Hannah Senesch, Ethel Rosenberg. (p141)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. 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? (p150)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“one period's necessary strategies can mutate into the monsters of a later time.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.-both leaders with large constituencies-had been murdered just as each was unscrolling a map on which race and class intersected in a shared landscape.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I still believe what I wrote in 1971: A change in the of sexual identity is essential if we are not to see the old political order reassert itself in every new revolution.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe in the necessity for a poetic language untethered from the compromised language of state and media.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A new century, even a new technology, doesn't of itself produce newness. It is live human beings, looking in all directions, who will do this.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've said that "American Jews" have paid an intellectual and spiritual price for the narrowing of sight demanded by conformity and reliance on Israel as surrogate identity. Part of this price has been estrangement of many Jews from any Jewish affiliation. But, of course, in reality American Jews disagree like all other Jews, past and future.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“diaspora-a multifaceted condition-means never always, or anywhere, being just like other Jews. It means class and cultural difference, dissension, contradiction, different languages and foods, living in different ages and relationships to tradition, world politics, and the "always/already" of anti-Semitism.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I drew a lot of nourishment from the poets that I then was aware of and able to be aware of, poets like William Blake, like Emily Dickinson, like Whitman, people whose—and then later, somewhat later, Yeats, who taught me in fact that poetry could be political and still be incredibly beautiful. And on and on, because one is always reading, one is always extending one’s range into the world of poetry translated from other languages, poetry from other centuries. (1997)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do. (2001)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture. (2001)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two. (2001)”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“ultimately language alone cannot liberate us”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It feels to me that I need to know more than I ever did in order to be a poet, that I need to be conscious of what is happening on this planet in ways that I never used to think about. And it's not that that takes the place of the work of the imagination, but that each of us has an imagination that has itself been created by a set of circumstances, some very nourishing, some very negative in terms of becoming blinders-the lacunae, the cartoon-imagery.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“in the women's movement, writers have so often been seen and cited as spokespeople and as leaders. My feeling is that it is the activists who move the rest of us, and that one may explain, describe, praise, deplore or whatever what is actually happening in the way of action-and that's very important, so I'm not selling the word short either when I say this-but, you don't make a political movement simply out of words.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We don't shed racism or sexism because we're in a liberation movement unless we struggle hard to try to create bridges, to find out where our common base is, to become educated in each other's realities, to search for and document the mistakes of the past so we can stop making them. I'm thinking particularly of the history of the nineteenth-century white suffrage movement, the early North American feminist movement, its visions, and its racist stances, despite its roots in the Abolitionist movement.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Where connections are being made always feels to me like the point of intensest life.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was thinking a lot about something that wasn't being talked about at the time very much. I was thinking about where sexuality belonged in all this. What is the connection between Vietnam and the lovers' bed? If this insane violence is being waged against a very small country by this large and powerful country in which I live, what does that have to do with sexuality and with what's going on between men and women, which I felt also as a struggle even then?”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“you see your parents first of all as these great looming figures who have no past, no context. They're just there and over and against you. Or they're not there, which is another kind of looming presence-looming absence. But I've been learning to see my father and to think about his life more and more and more in the context of the social and political world, if you will, that he grew up in, to think about the things that brought him to where he was when I knew him, especially the meaning of his Jewishness.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People have to put bread on the table and they're trying to do political work as well.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Some people are tired and burnt-out, but I see new women and men-coming along all the time. And that is very refreshing and very inspiring. It's not as though the same cast of characters that was there in the early seventies still has to be doing it all now. The cast of characters has grown; some have left, some have taken time out and returned, others have come in, many with new understandings, with new contributions.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the things that has been growing in the women's movement in this country-and again, in a society like this it can't, it doesn't happen easily, and it doesn't happen overnight-is the consciousness that we aren't a homogeneous movement, that we are a multi-ethnic movement, that women's experiences across the board are different, even though we share common female experiences. There's been a tremendous enrichment through those understandings, and through the visibility, the leadership, of women of color, and the work of Jewish feminists; that has certainly been part of the last few years.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“at the time I started writing, that was already set up as a problem. If you were going to be writing a truly new poetry, could you use the old forms?”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I guess what I'm searching for always is a way of staying linked to the past, pulling out of it whatever you can use, and continuing to move on.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One of the most sensual and sensuous women poets I can think of is Audre Lorde. She thinks in images that are most certainly lesbian images. But also images from Afro-Caribbean culture and from African mythology and experience. And that's a very powerful combination. Because that also has not been available in most poetry in English.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(“Costs-in a word. So much of your work has been a struggle to speak honestly and openly, whether about poetry itself or about social issues, about racism, about lesbianism. What are the costs of doing so, as a poet, as a person?") What would be the cost of not doing it? I feel as though it's for my survival, first and foremost. This is how I cope, this is how I survive. I have learned from my peers that this way of creating can be a way of surviving. I didn't invent that.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“language is this medium that we hand back and forth between us in all human relationships all the time, it doesn't really have a privileged place. It's this coinage in which we keep trying to get a hold of each other or make ourselves clear. So, the fact that poetry was available to me for that is very important.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Experience is always larger than language. And there's always the next poem, yes. Not necessarily because I feel I've falsified something, but because I wrote it as I knew it then, and I'm going to know it differently in six months. Or I'm going to know something else. Or I'm going to need to know something else, and the only way I can get to it is by writing that poem.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“we teachers used to talk a lot about who fails the teacher or the student-when you have a classroom situation which is rigged entirely against the student, or in which the teacher is too ignorant to teach. Not ignorant of grammar, but ignorant of the students, ignorant of their culture. So, I was thinking very much about our failures, the map of our failures, we who consider ourselves so possessed of language, so articulate.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think we're at a very interesting watershed, because I have been seeing and noting a tremendous renaissance of poetry in the United States over the past ten to twenty years nourished by the voices of many groups which had been largely silenced before that-by the voices of women, the voices of people of color, the voices of gay men and lesbians, the voices of working-class, white Americans. There is a seething, burgeoning poetry out there, but it's many poetries, and it's coming from many cultures and many communities.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(question about democracy) It is more than troubled. I mean, it may be sliding out of our grasp. It goes without saying that this has never been a full democracy. It has always been a selective democracy, offering a few people the full enjoyment of a democratic society, but it has always been repressive toward certain groups, and I don't think that it is less so now. I think we're seeing a failure of the democratic dream and a cynicism toward that dream, so that the dream becomes mere rhetoric in the mouths of politicians and corporations.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that poetry asks us to consider the quality of life. Poetry reflects on the quality of life, on us as we are in process on this earth, in our lives, in our relationships, in our communities. It embodies what makes it possible for us to continue as human under the barrage of brute violence, numbing indifference, trivialization, and shallowness that we endure, not to speak of what has come to seem in public life like a total loss on the part of politicians of any desire even to appear consistent, or to appear to adhere to principle.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Something has to die in order for us to begin to know our truths. Perhaps we have to lose our national fantasies.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“when I say "radical" I mean at the root, real. Real social transformation, real change has to come out of a love of life and a love for the world, not hatred of the world. Increasingly what I fear and what I see is a movement of people on the right who are moving from a hatred of human beings, a hatred of the other, a hatred of life. That's why I say there is nothing wrong with personal happiness if you can take it and use it as a key, a measure, a standard.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think there are many different kinds of dread for many different kinds of people. I think that more and more people feel uncared for, feel that their lives are not only unvalued but meaningless, feel that though they may care for their lives, no one else will, feel that the only way that they can protect their survival and interests is by the gun. I'm afraid that many people feel an enormous desperation which plays into the propaganda of hate.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A sense of community seems to arise out of the word. Well, that's true. I believe that. I think that's one of the reasons that communities of poetry, and I don't just mean communities of poets, but everywhere in this country communities of poetry-of people reading poetry, listening to poetry, coming together around poetry-are becoming so widespread. It's as if this gathering around the word occurs in response to worsening conditions.”
Adrienne Rich (1929–2012) said by 2012 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source