Adrienne Rich Quotes

I think that passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry. (from "Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman" 1977)

(“Costs-in a word. So much of your work has been a struggle to speak honestly and openly, whether about poetry itself or about social issues, about racism, about lesbianism. What are the costs of doing so, as a poet, as a person?") What would be the cost of not doing it? I feel as though it's for my survival, first and foremost. This is how I cope, this is how I survive. I have learned from my peers that this way of creating can be a way of surviving. I didn't invent that.

poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know. ("When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision")

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society. ("When We Dead Awaken: Writing As Re-Vision")

I grew up in a social and familial world in which there was a great deal of splitting. I've written an essay called "Split at the Root" which actually speaks about my own family roots: Jewish and Gentile. But it was also a world very split by segregation. Baltimore in the thirties and forties was a deeply segregated city. There weren't back-of-the-bus rules, but Black people did not shop in the same department stores as white people, there was the interracial eating taboo, and so on. That kind of thing a child grows up acutely aware of, even if it's never talked about, and of course there was a great deal of pressure not to talk about it. It was a given. And it was a given that, needless to say, white people were extremely tense about. But we learned not to ask questions about it or to discuss it. We did not go to school with Black children. The Black people that I grew up knowing all worked for white people as domestic workers. So that left a profound impact, in the sense that it was a situation which, I think from a very young age, I felt was so-uncomfortable is hardly the word-almost intolerable. There was so much that wasn't explained, there were codes of behavior that you couldn't question but that you couldn't figure out...When the Civil Rights movement came long in the late fifties, early sixties, and I began to hear Black voices describing and analyzing what were the concrete issues for Black people, like segregation, like racism, it came to me as a great relief. It was like finding language for something that I'd needed a language for all along. That was the first place where I heard a language to name oppression. And it was an enormous relief, even as it threw up a lot of questions for me as to where I stood with all this.

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.

I think I've brought figures of resistance into my poetry for quite a while-going back to the voice of Mary Wollstonecraft in "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law" (1960). History has always felt to me an immense resource for art, and poetry as a place where history can be kept alive-not grand master narratives, but otherwise forgotten or erased people and actions. In the 1970s we were rediscovering women whose lives had been dropped out of history or distorted, like Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Emily Dickinson, Marie Curie, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Hannah Senesch, Ethel Rosenberg. (p141)

language is this medium that we hand back and forth between us in all human relationships all the time, it doesn't really have a privileged place. It's this coinage in which we keep trying to get a hold of each other or make ourselves clear. So, the fact that poetry was available to me for that is very important.

I think my work comes out of both an intense desire for connection and what it means to feel isolated. There's always going to be a kind of tidal movement back and forth between the two. (2001)

(“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.

The split in our language between “political” and “personal” has, I think, been a trap.

to be “against war” has come to seem too easy a stance. War exists in a texture of possession and deprivation, economic and religious dogmas, racism, colonialist exploitation, nationalism, unequal power. Who decides to make war? Who is destroyed in it? Who creates the rhetoric of “terror” and “democracy”?

Our ears, like it or not, take in so much in a day. Maybe some North American ears have trouble with poetry because of the noise from an aggressively voiced ruling ethos—its terminology of war, success, national security, winning and losing, ownership, merchandising, canned information, canned laughter. Poetry can be direct, it can be colloquial, it can be abrupt or angry, but it’s not that vacuous noise; it wants to unseat that kind of language, play other kinds of sound tracks.

Where every public decision has to be justified in the scales of corporate profits, poetry unsettles these apparently self-evident propositions-not through ideology, but by its very presence and ways of being, its embodiment of states of longing and desire. (Preface)

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. It takes some strength of soul--and not just individual strength, but collective understanding--to resist this void, this non-being, into which you are thrust, and to stand up, demanding to be seen and heard. And to make yourself visible, to claim that your experience is just as real and normative as any other... ("Invisibility in Academe")