Adrienne Rich Quotes

For a very long time, poems were a way of talking about what I couldn't talk about any other way. And why is it that you're not able to talk about certain things? It's because they are the points of danger, you feel that in the social fabric, you feel there are people who don't want you to raise this question, or if you're a child-to ask this question. That is the threatening place, and of course it becomes a place of great fascination too. I was equipped from a very young age to use language in this way because of how I was brought up, and by whom I was brought up, and the fact that poetry was available to me as a choice, when it might not have been for another seven or ten years if I'd been another child.

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.

we need to know where we have been: we need our history.

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.

In the permissive liberalism of academic Cambridge, you could raise your children to be as vaguely or distinctly Jewish as you would, but Christian myth and calendar organized the year. My sons grew up knowing far more about the existence and concrete meaning of Jewish culture than I had. But I don't recall sitting down with them and telling them that millions of people like themselves, many of them children, had been rounded up and murdered in Europe in their parents' lifetime. Nor was I able to tell them that they came in part out of the rich, thousand-year-old Ashkenazic culture of eastern Europe, which the Holocaust destroyed; or that they came from a people whose traditions, religious and secular, included a hatred of oppression and an imperative to pursue justice and care for the stranger-an anti-racist, a socialist, and even sometimes a feminist vision. I could not tell them these things because these things were still too indistinct in my own mind.

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've written a great deal about that whole issue of dead language, the oppressor's language, a language that is no longer useful, and the need to try to find a new language, a common language, if you will. It's the question of associations with words and of the history of words, and how they come down to us and how we go on with them. But I'm beginning to think and talk a lot more again about that which goes along with language and poetry-which is music, the vibration of a voice. I see that intonation, that vocal quality, as something that is very personal, out of the self, and then combines with the many traditions, the many histories that we've been exposed to, that we come out of.

it’s not even an ad hominem thing about President Clinton, although I find him cowardly and spineless. I am concerned about what it means when we have two parties which are so close together in their collaboration with the wealthiest interests in the country and who are so alike in their disregard for the majority of people in this country. And I feel as if the relative creative freedom of artists and intellectuals ultimately depends on the conditions everywhere and the conditions of human labor everywhere. We’re all working. We’re all trying to do our work. And the circumstances, the conditions under which working people exist in the society are not something that can be separated and left aside from the position of the artist. I just don’t see how you can do that. (1997)

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out-of-control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us of kinship where all is represented as separation.

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

To be able to ask even the child's astonished question Why do they hate us so? means knowing how to say "we."

I look everywhere for signs of that fusion I have glimpsed in the women's movement, and most recently in Nicaragua. I turn to Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters or Ama Ata Aidoo's Our Sister Killjoy or James Baldwin's Just above My Head; to paintings by Frida Kahlo or Jacob Lawrence; to poems by Dionne Brand or Judy Grahn or Audre Lorde or Nancy Morejón; to the music of Nina Simone or Mary Watkins. This kind of art-like the art of so many others uncanonized in the dominant culture-is not produced as a commodity, but as part of a long conversation with the elders and with the future. (And, yes, I do live and work believing in a future.) Such artists draw on a tradition in which political struggle and spiritual continuity are meshed. Nothing need be lost, no beauty sacrificed. The heart does not turn to a stone. ("Blood, Bread, and Poetry: The Location of the Poet" 1983)

I am a citizen of a country that has just undergone a thieved election, a country deeply and dangerously divided between rich and poor, but also between rich and middle class. What I believe in and what my government represents are not the same thing.

One of the insidious rhetorical devices of the U.S. Right has been to claim (for example) that empathy with others is merely “liberal guilt” or “political correctness,” that compassion is merely sentimental or even hypocritical. I see it as an entirely cynical view that underscores the profit motive as the only real basis for human relationships.

("What do you get from those people listening to you here? What happens between you and the audience at a reading?") I have to say again that the kinds of support and the kinds of challenge that I receive from the lives of others around me-poets, non-poets, other kinds of artists, and activists-carries me. I don't feel like a solitary person in my lonely room at all, even though I have to spend hours alone in a room to do what I do. I believe that a poem isn't completed until there's a reader at the other end of it. It can't just be produced, it also has to be received. And so, yes, I feel that the poems are being completed in so many different ways by so many different minds and consciousnesses.