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
reality poetry tongue
Reality, the oppressor's tongue.
faces authority certain
I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
wall war grief
The [Vietnam War Memorial] Wall became a magnet for citizens of every generation, class, race, and relationship to the war perhaps because it is the only great public monument that allows the anesthetized holes in the heart to fill with a truly national grief.
children motherhood identity
Motherhood, in the sense of an intense, reciprocal relationship with a particular child, or children, is one part of female process; it is not an identity for all time.
diminish
Any woman's death diminishes me.
mother mind body
But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
mother daughter personality
Our personalities seem dangerously to blur and overlap with our mother's; and, in a desperate attempt to know where mother ends and daughter begins, we perform radical surgery.
feelings desire zone
Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
mother realization states
Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother ... when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.
optimism long important
It is important to possess a short-term pessimism and a long-term optimism ...
sexuality limbs adolescence
The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs ...
growing-up real light
... people are growing up in the slack flicker of a pale light which lacks the concentrated burn of a candle flame or oil wick or the bulb of a gooseneck desk lamp: a pale, wavering, oblong shimmer, emitting incessant noise, which is to real knowledge or discourse what the manic or weepy protestations of a drunk are to responsible speech. Drunks do have a way of holding an audience, though, and so does the shimmery ill-focused oblong screen.
solitude
Marriage is lonelier than solitude.
risk survival use
[The poet] is endowed to speak for those who do not have the gift of language, or to see for those who - for whatever reasons - are less conscious of what they are living through. It is as though the risks of the poet's existence can be put to some use beyond her own survival.