Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Cecile Richwas an American poet, essayist and radical feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth16 May 1929
CityBaltimore, MD
CountryUnited States of America
Adrienne Rich quotes about
love fever
We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever.
dream knows
Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.
rejection heterosexuality way
Lesbian existence comprises both the breaking of a taboo and the rejection of a compulsory way of life. It is also a direct or indirect attack on the male right of access to women.
mind trying shapes
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.
running thinking romance
We might possess every technological resource... but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be 'revolutionary' but not transformative.
truth-is complexity one-thing
There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
teacher psychics mirrors
When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
writing white history
We have seen over and over that white male historians in general have tended to dismiss any history they didn't themselves write,on the grounds that it is unserious, unscholarly, a fad, too "political," "merely" oral and thus unreliable.
spiritual aquifers voice
... 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.
time years missing
Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young.
notebook prayer memories
When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand--a center of gravity.
passion poetry survival
... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.
life poetry taught
Can you remember? when we thought the poets taught how to live?
powerful lying secret
In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.