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
life memories suspense
We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia; terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
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.
memories lying grandchildren
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, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.
dream memories writing
To write as if your life depended on it; to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged; sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
memories lying letters
Whatever is unnamed, undepicted in images, whatever is omitted from biography, censored in collections of letters, whatever is misnamed as something else, made difficult-to-come-by, whatever is buried in the memory by the collapse of meaning under an inadequate or lying language - this will become, not merely unspoken, but unspeakable.
fake-people memories real
Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events.
air america bring design face fire flag heart open seen slow stopped sucked true
Open Air Museum. Seen from a train, stopped / As by design, to bring us / Face to face with the flag of our true country: / Violet-yellow, black-violet, / Its heart sucked by slow fire / O my America / This then your desire?
daughter father creativity
It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack.
heart weather predictions
Weather abroad and weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.
art wall years
One line typed twenty years ago can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint to glorify art as detachment or torture of those we did not love but also did not want to kill.
writing knowledge long
I long to create something that can't be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
life tools
A life I didn't choose chose me: even my tools are the wrong ones for what I have to do.
philosophy past wind
... if, as women, we accept a philosophy of history that asserts that women are by definition assimilated into the male universal,that we can understand our past through a male lens--if we are unaware that women even have a history--we live our lives similarly unanchored, drifting in response to a veering wind of myth and bias.
hope mean cities
What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.