You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry. Adrienne Rich More Quotes by Adrienne Rich More Quotes From Adrienne Rich I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to ... vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding. Adrienne Rich understanding white people No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city. Adrienne Rich passion air animal We are, none of us, 'either' mothers or daughters; to our amazement, confusion, and greater complexity, we are both. Adrienne Rich daughter confusion mother In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself. Adrienne Rich ignorance determination children The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind. Adrienne Rich body mind Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon's eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on doing now diagram the sentence Adrienne Rich dark sleep thinking There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected. Adrienne Rich revolutionary body men Since we're not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other.Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we're not young. Adrienne Rich missing time years Sexist grammar burns into the brains of little girls and young women a message that the male is the norm, the standard, the central figure beside which we are all deviants, the marginal, the dependent variables. It lays the foundation for androcentric thinking, and leaves men safe in their solipsistic tunnel-vision. Adrienne Rich girl men thinking Each feminist work has tended to be received as if it emerged from nowhere; as if each one of us had lived, thought, and worked without any historical past or contextual present. This is one of the ways in which women's work and thinking has been made to seem sporadic, errant, orphaned of any tradition of its own. Adrienne Rich justice past thinking The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell. Adrienne Rich obscurity passion mind If we had time and no money, living by our wits, what story would you tell? Adrienne Rich no-money wit stories I believe that words can help us move or keep us paralysed, and that our choices of language and verbal tone have something - a great deal - to do with how we live our lives and whom we end up speaking with and hearing; and that we can deflect words by trivialization, of course, but also by ritualized respect, or we can let them enter our souls and mix with the juices of our minds. Adrienne Rich respect life believe But can you imagine how some of them were envying you your freedom to work, to think, to travel, to enter a room as yourself, not as some child’s mother or some man’s wife?…we have no familiar, ready-made name for a woman who defines herself, by choice, neither in relation to children nor to men, who is self-identified, who has chosen herself. Adrienne Rich mother men children Re-vision -- the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction - is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Adrienne Rich vision survival eye These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know. Adrienne Rich scar destruction bears In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence. Adrienne Rich violence silence world I soon began to sense a fundamental perceptual difficulty among male scholars (and some female ones) for which 'sexism' is too facile a term. It is really an intellectual defect, which might be termed 'patrivincialism' or patrochialism': the assumption that women are a subgroup, that men's culture is the 'real' world, that patriarchy is equivalent to culture and culture to patriarchy, that the 'great' or 'liberalizing' periods of history have been the same for women as for men. Adrienne Rich intellectual real men Those who speak largely of the human condition are usually those most exempt from its oppressions - whether of sex, race, or servitude. Adrienne Rich speak race sex ... this world gives no room Adrienne Rich giving rooms world
