A language is a map of our failures Adrienne Rich More Quotes by Adrienne Rich More Quotes From Adrienne Rich In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination. Adrienne Rich voice imagination art 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. Adrienne Rich letters memories lying False history gets made all day, any day, the truth of the new is never on the news. Adrienne Rich news historical new-day There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet Adrienne Rich unseen patterns looks Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement. Adrienne Rich energy giving two In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the Adrienne Rich powerful secret lying We who were loved will never unlive that crippling fever. Adrienne Rich fever love 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. Adrienne Rich grandchildren memories lying For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. Adrienne Rich capacity mean way One does not give birth in a void, but rather in a cultural and political context. Laws, professional codes, religious sanctions, and ethnic traditions all affect women's choices concerning childbirth. Adrienne Rich religious law giving 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. Adrienne Rich relief mind trying Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone. Adrienne Rich voice stones writing 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. Adrienne Rich revolutionary desire might Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep. Adrienne Rich midnight enough sleep Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty. Adrienne Rich heterosexuality-is poverty cost The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth. Adrienne Rich want-something speak truth Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know. Adrienne Rich knows dream We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege Adrienne Rich our-words privilege moving It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!' Adrienne Rich mothers-day eye children 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. Adrienne Rich psychics mirrors teacher
