Quotes for All
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. Adrienne Rich
I define “politics” as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create – not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions. Adrienne Rich
As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry. Adrienne Rich
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. Adrienne Rich
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. Adrienne Rich
I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines. Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think … Read more
I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university. Adrienne Rich
Women’s art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working. Adrienne Rich
War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. Adrienne Rich
I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn’t know that, and I have no carbons. Adrienne Rich