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
exercise simple goes-on
No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should beginwith the simple exercises firstand slowly go on tryingthe hard ones, practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chance of breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
body whatever-happens mines
Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine
running children past
Even where love has run thin the child's soul musters strength... the rush of purpose to make a life worth living past abandonment building the layers up again over the torn hole.
imagination challenges alternatives
If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.
heterosexuality-is cost poverty
Heterosexuality has been forcibly and subliminally imposed on women. Yet everywhere women have resisted it, often at the cost of physical torture, imprisonment, psychosurgery, social ostracism, and extreme poverty.
language enough
Go back so far there is another language go back far enough the language is no longer personal.
teacher mirrors world
When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
real tunnels voice
The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?
eye survival 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 women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival.
real choices decision
The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.
winning men self
To become a token woman--whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters--is to become something less than a mansince men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
art feminist culture
The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are "objective"and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!
giving world rooms
... this world gives no room to be what we dreamt of being
dream escaping political
When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders ... then I began to wonder