Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Cecile Richwas an American poet, essayist and radical feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth16 May 1929
CityBaltimore, MD
CountryUnited States of America
self numbness despair
Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.
america united-states danger
In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
growing-up children war
Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
long violence
We have lived with violence far too long.
liars lying silence
The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
lying liars ought
Lies are usually attempts to make everything simpler - for the liar - than it really is, or ought to be.
stranger endangered-species species
Strangers are an endangered species ...
loneliness liars lying
The liar leads an existence of unutterable loneliness.
hate passion race
White hate crimes, white hate speech. I still try to claim I wasn't brought up to hate. But hate isn't the half of it. I grew up in the vast encircling presumption of whiteness - that primary quality of being which knows itself, its passions, only against an otherness that has to be dehumanized. I grew up in white silence that was utterly obsessional. Race was the theme whatever the topic.
violent process honorable
An honorable human relationship ... is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
believe poetry trying
The necessity of poetry has to be stated over and over, but only to those who have reason to fear its power, or those who still believe that language is 'only words' and that an old language is good enough for our descriptions of the world we are trying to transform.
tvs television kind
TV has created a kind of false collectivity.
thinking health-education poetry
I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.
motherhood assumption mesh
motherhood is the great mesh in which all human relations are entangled, in which lurk our most elemental assumptions about love and power.