Adrienne Rich: If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story fl...

The moment of change is the only poem.

Adrienne Rich

poetry change healing

They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order is death by famine worse than death by suicide, than a life of famine and suicide...?

Adrienne Rich

pain suicide death

It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness

Adrienne Rich

resentment nerves suffering

All new learning looks at first like chaos.

Adrienne Rich

chaos looks firsts

A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.

Adrienne Rich

scar cutting flesh

Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.

Adrienne Rich

wall subjects ivy

In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded - here I am speaking of the U.S. - while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school, there is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien - and very often they believe themselves superior.

Adrienne Rich

educational believe school

Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.

Adrienne Rich

motherhood identity children

I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from "Splittings

Adrienne Rich

splitting

Grief held back from the lips wears at the heart; the drop that refused to join the river dried up in the dust.

Adrienne Rich

dust grief heart

I long to create something

Adrienne Rich

writing long knowledge

The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political

Adrienne Rich

political body feelings

The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To "see the light" too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.

Adrienne Rich

light change people

There's been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I'm speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing. Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.

Adrienne Rich

males political real

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.

Adrienne Rich

effort order art

It iscrucial that we understand lesbian/feminism in the deepest, most radical sense: as that love for ourselves and other women, that commitment to the freedom of all of us, which transcends the category of "sexual preference" and the issue of civil rights, to become a politics of asking women's questions, demanding a world in which the integrity of all women--not a chosen few--shall be honored and validated in every respect of culture.

Adrienne Rich

issues integrity commitment

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.

Adrienne Rich

alternatives imagination challenges

In [family snapshots] the flow of profane time has been stopped and a sacred interval of self-conscious revelation has been cut from it by the edge of the picture frame and the light of the sun or the flash.

Adrienne Rich

cutting light self

A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul of her country as she wrestles for her own being.

Adrienne Rich

patriotism soul country

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

Adrienne Rich

dignity art thinking

If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.