The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious. Adrienne Rich More Quotes by Adrienne Rich More Quotes From Adrienne Rich A language is a map of our failures Adrienne Rich maps language When my dreams showed signs Adrienne Rich escaping political dream To work and suffer is to be at home. Adrienne Rich scenery suffering home Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination. Adrienne Rich confusion imagination war No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones, practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue. Adrienne Rich simple goes-on exercise I keep coming back to you in my head, but you couldn't know that, and I have no carbons. Adrienne Rich missing-someone missing-you i-miss-you I have an inward treasure born with me, which can keep me alive if all the extraneous delights should be withheld or offered only at a price I cannot afford to give. Adrienne Rich delight alive giving You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming. Adrienne Rich hate writing night I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers. Adrienne Rich gay use talking Much male fear of feminism is the fear that, in becoming whole human beings, women will cease to mother men, to provide the breast, the lullaby, the continuous attention associated by the infant with the mother. Much male fear of feminism is infantilism–the longing to remain the mother’s son, to possess a woman who exists purely for him. Adrienne Rich mother men son Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single "I" or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own. Adrienne Rich theatre voice thinking I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud. Adrienne Rich writing mean book A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it. Adrienne Rich editors chance book The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance. Adrienne Rich tolerance keys doors Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, "What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?" Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society? Adrienne Rich psychics stories want Language is as real, as tangible, in our lives as streets, pipelines, telephone switchboards, microwaves, radioactivity, cloning laboratories, nuclear power stations. Adrienne Rich cloning nuclear real In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming "support-groups" or therapy groups. Adrienne Rich support needs thinking In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world, if poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day. Adrienne Rich war book world "Global culture" is of course not a culture: it's the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many. Adrienne Rich commodity marketing culture Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture. Adrienne Rich mistrust becoming culture
