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
mind body
The will to change begins in the body, not in the mind.
passion mind obscurity
The mind's passion is all for singling out. Obscurity has another tale to tell.
reality mad mind
Women have been driven mad, “gaslighted”, for centuries by the refutation of our experience and our instincts in a culture which validates only male experience. The truth of our bodies and our minds has been mystified to us. We therefore have primary obligation to each other: not to undermine each other’s sense of reality for the sake of expediency; not to gaslight each other.
mother mind body
But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
knives cake mind
Your mind now, moldering like wedding-cake, heavy with useless experience, rich with suspicion, rumour, fantasy, crumbling to pieces under the knife-edge of mere fact. In the prime of your life.
mind trying shapes
I am an instrument in the shape/ of a woman trying to translate pulsations/ into images for the relief of the body/ and the reconstruction of the mind.
feeling language might possess process remains resource running thinking vision
We might possess every technological resource . . . but if our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be "revolutionary" but not transformative.
feeling language might north ourselves possess process remains resource running thinking vision
We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be ''revolutionary'' but not transformative.
art convert equal hiv rage though verdict
It's as though she was able to convert her rage to live under this verdict of HIV into an art that was actually equal to it.
country believe government
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.
thinking world academic
I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.
years imagination path
Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.
art dysfunction adequate
What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.
dogma poet young
As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.