Adrienne Rich Quotes

Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, glib or visionary, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness. What's pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images — is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism — a stunted language? Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference? Poetry has the capacity to remind us of something we are forbidden to see. A forgotten future: a still uncreated site whose moral architecture is founded not on ownership and dispossession, the subjection of women, outcast and tribe, but on the continuous redefining of freedom — that word now held under house arrest by the rhetoric of the "free" market. This on-going future, written-off over and over, is still within view. All over the world its paths are being rediscovered and reinvented. There is always that in poetry which will not be grasped, which cannot be described, which survives our ardent attention, our critical theories, our late-night arguments. There is always (I am quoting the poet/translator Américo Ferrari) "an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides".

it came to me that every one of those piles of corpses, mountains of shoes and clothing had contained, simply, individuals, who had believed, as I now believed of myself, that they were intended to live out a life of some kind of meaning, that the world possessed some kind of sense and order, yet this had happened to them.

The music, the sound of words working together, has always mattered to me.

sometimes I feel inadequate to make any statement as a Jew; I feel the history of denial within me like an injury, a scar. For assimilation has affected my perceptions; those early lapses in meaning, those blanks, are with me still. My ignorance can be dangerous to me and to others. Yet we can't wait for the undamaged to make our connections for us; we can't wait to speak until we are perfectly clear and righteous. There is no purity and, in our lifetimes, no end to this process.

Experience is always larger than language. And there's always the next poem, yes. Not necessarily because I feel I've falsified something, but because I wrote it as I knew it then, and I'm going to know it differently in six months. Or I'm going to know something else. Or I'm going to need to know something else, and the only way I can get to it is by writing that poem.

what isn't named is often more permeating than what is

The struggle for Black civil rights had such clarity about it for me: I knew that segregation was wrong, that unequal opportunity was wrong, I knew that segregation in particular was more than a set of social and legal rules-it meant that even "decent" white people lived in a network of lies and arrogance and moral collusion.

at the time I started writing, that was already set up as a problem. If you were going to be writing a truly new poetry, could you use the old forms?

Sometimes I feel I have seen too long from too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, feminist, exmatriate southerner, split at the root-that I will never bring them whole.

One of the things that has been growing in the women's movement in this country-and again, in a society like this it can't, it doesn't happen easily, and it doesn't happen overnight-is the consciousness that we aren't a homogeneous movement, that we are a multi-ethnic movement, that women's experiences across the board are different, even though we share common female experiences. There's been a tremendous enrichment through those understandings, and through the visibility, the leadership, of women of color, and the work of Jewish feminists; that has certainly been part of the last few years.

I believe in the necessity for a poetic language untethered from the compromised language of state and media.

I intend to go on making poetry. I intend to go on trying to be part of what I think of as an underground stream-of voices resisting the voices that tell us we are nothing, that we are worthless, or that we all hate each other, or should hate each other. I think that there is a real culture of resistance here-of artists' and of other kinds of voices-that will continue, however bad things get in this country. I want to make myself part of that and do my work as well as I can. I want to love those I love as well as I can, and I want to love life as well as I can.

(“Do you think there has been a regression during the past ten years from the progress made by the women's movement? Has its momentum slowed, and, if so, will the movement pick up its pace again to what it was in the 1970s? Is there now a sense of exhaustion?”) Well, it very much depends on how you look at the contours of the landscape. An astonishing number of feminist institutions were founded in the seventies. And a lot of movement was going on in existing institutions like universities. But the kind of political retrenchment that began, I think, before Reagan was elected, and in fact led up to his election, inevitably was accompanied by the reassertion of old conservative values about women, and about sexuality. And those attitudes have come down hard.

I began as a formalist because that was the poetic tradition—Anglo-European—that I first knew. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were there of course, but Dickinson’s work was edited into a prim textual conformity until 1960 when the poems in their original form exploded my ideas of poetry. Also, my own life pushed me beyond the conventions of formalism—along with reading my direct contemporaries who were exploring open forms, like Denise Levertov, W.S. Merwin, and Galway Kinnell. All this was in the Sixties when the most intense life was lived around politics—the Black Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, very large moral questions were in the air, along with a great deal of hope, and the revolutions in Africa and Central America were part of that consciousness. That period has been trashed by the Right as mere posturing, violence and drug abuse. But it was in many ways both a practical and a visionary time.

A series of poems by a lot of poets have been up in the New York subway. The head of the Transit Authority is a lover of poetry and he decided he wanted "poetry in motion." I was very happy to see that. The same thing has been done in the bus system in San Diego, California, and I think it should be happening everywhere. I think the question of "how do we get people to read poetry?" might be to some extent resolved if people saw more poetry out in the world, places where they go, in just the ordinary public places where everybody has to stand on line, or hang from the strap, waiting, because people would be reading poetry. They would find themselves reading it and absorbing it...I hope many people who saw that poem ("Delta") in the subway thought, "Yes-you can't wrap me up in the story of my life. I am more complicated than you can know."