The emergence of the Civil Rights movement in the sixties I remember as lifting me out of a sense of personal frustration and hopelessness. Reading J… - Adrienne Rich
" "The emergence of the Civil Rights movement in the sixties I remember as lifting me out of a sense of personal frustration and hopelessness. Reading James Baldwin's early essays in the fifties had stirred me with a sense that apparently "given" situations like racism could be analyzed and described and that this could lead to action, to change. Racism had been so utter and implicit a fact of my childhood and adolescence, had felt so central among the silences, negations, cruelties, fears, superstitions of my early life, that somewhere among my feelings must have been the hope that if Black people could become free of the immense political and social burdens they were forced to bear, I, too, could become free of all the ghosts and shadows of my childhood, named and unnamed. When "the movement" began, it felt extremely personal to me. And it was often Jews who spoke up for the justice of the cause, Jewish students and civil rights lawyers who travelled South; it was two young Jews who were found murdered with a young Black man in Mississippi: Schwerner, Goodman, Chaney.
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About Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich (16 May 1929 - 27 March 2012) was an American feminist, poet, teacher, and writer.
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Adrienne Cecile Rich
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Adrienne Cécile Rich
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Adrienne Riche
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Adrienne C. Rich
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Additional quotes by Adrienne Rich
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.
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)
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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)
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