Latest Adrienne Rich Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Writing, Needs

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Reading, Writing

• The women's movement appeared at a very crucial moment in my life. There was a whole political movement asking such questions and others I had never asked. I began to feel heard in that movement. But it was because my voice was resonating with other voices.

  Adrienne Rich

  Voice, Political, Asking

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• I don't want to succumb to the idea that for the generation, or generations, raised on television, the text is irrelevant or so intimidating that they won't deal with it. If you teach, you see this is not true. It may be that newer generations do not worship the text as some of their elders do.

  Adrienne Rich

  Ideas, Generations, Television

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• Young people know they are being betrayed by he mass electronic media. It caricatures them, caricatures others. It is not really about them though it targets them as consumers.

  Adrienne Rich

  Media, People, Target

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Writing, Mean

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• In a society where some people are far more educated than others, in which public education is ill-funded - here I am speaking of the U.S. - while we build more and more prisons to incarcerate youth who ought to be in school, there is already a gap between those with education and those without. Those with educational privilege can be seen as arrogant, remote, alien - and very often they believe themselves superior.

  Adrienne Rich

  Educational, Believe, School

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• I am uncomfortable with talking of poetry as a priestly profession, because I have little use for organized religions and priestly hierarchies. They have demoralized, persecuted, so many, including women, gays, non-believers.

  Adrienne Rich

  Gay, Talking, Use

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• Increasingly I think of poetry as a theatre of voices, not as coming from a single "I" or from any one position. I want to imagine voices different from my own.

  Adrienne Rich

  Thinking, Voice, Theatre

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• A book of poems doesn't just come out by chance, an editor has to select it, a publisher has to distribute it or you will never see it.

  Adrienne Rich

  Book, Editors, Chance

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• I think many poets, including myself, write both for the voice and for the page. I certainly write for the person alone in the library, who pulls down a book and it opens to a poem. I am also very conscious of what it means to read these poems aloud.

  Adrienne Rich

  Book, Writing, Mean

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• There's been real hostility toward political poetry in the U.S., hostility or, at best, incomprehension. I'm speaking of those who have institutional power over what gets published, over grants andprizes and reviewing. Most of them, though not all, arewhite and male. But even as American society is unravelling, becoming more violent and punitive, wonderful political poetshave been emerging.

  Adrienne Rich

  Real, Political, Males

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• Can individual psychic wounds really heal in an abusive and fragmented society? Audre Lorde has a poem which begins, "What do we want from each other/ after we have told our stories?" Where do we go to explore our stake with others in such a society?

  Adrienne Rich

  Psychics, Stories, Want

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• In the States, there has been, compared to the Sixties and Seventies, a huge retrenchment - not just in poetry - into the personal. A withdrawal from thinking in terms of social and collective values, needs and solutions. The consciousness-raising groups of the women's movement, for instance, becoming "support-groups" or therapy groups.

  Adrienne Rich

  Thinking, Support, Needs

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• We've learned a lot from the great psychologists. Wilhelm Reich wrote about the relationship between fascism and sexual repression. Freud rediscovered the underworld of consciousness that European rationalism had denied. But when you have a nation of people in therapy and counselling, "support" groups for every kind of human condition, where, in the clichés of that milieu, people "share" and "heal," the question, "What for?", "What now?" is no longer asked.

  Adrienne Rich

  People, Support, Groups

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• "Global culture" is of course not a culture: it's the global marketing and imposing of commodities and images for the interests of the few at the expense of the many.

  Adrienne Rich

  Marketing, Culture, Commodity

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• In 1945, just at the end of World War II, the American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote a remarkable book called The Life of Poetry. In it she says that on any particular day in the world, if poetry ceased to exist, it would immediately be reinvented on that same day.

  Adrienne Rich

  War, Book, World

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• Poetry reaches into places in us that we are suppose to ignore or mistrust, that are perceived as subversive or non-useful, in what is fast becoming known as global culture.

  Adrienne Rich

  Culture, Becoming, Mistrust

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• Poetry has always mattered, through human history, through all kinds of cultures, all kinds of violence and human desolation, as well as periods of great human affirmation. It's been associated with the power of the word, with the sacred, with magic and transformation, with the oral narratives that help a people cohere.

  Adrienne Rich

  People, Magic, Culture

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Voice, Imagination

  Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

• I've known great happiness in my life along with great darkness, and a question that has repeatedly entered my poetry has been, how do we use the direct experience of happiness that may be given us, whether of love and sexuality or creativity or the sense of connectedness with other beings, human and otherwise?

  Adrienne Rich

  Creativity, Darkness, Use

  Source: criticalflame.org

• 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.

  Adrienne Rich

  Country, Believe, Government

  Source: criticalflame.org

• I am always interested in the ways of scoring the sound of the poem, especially a poem with long lines. Spaces within a line, double colons, slashes, are indications of pause, of breath, of urgency, they are not metrically exact as in a musical notation but they serve (I hope) to make the reader think about the sound of the poem - just as traffic symbols, when driving, make us almost unconsciously aware of a steep hill, an intersection, an icy bridge etc.

  Adrienne Rich

  Thinking, Bridges, Space

  Source: criticalflame.org

• I think poets should work in the non-literary, non-academic world, get to know more than a workshop or a university.

  Adrienne Rich

  Thinking, World, Academic

  Source: criticalflame.org

• 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.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Dysfunction, Adequate

  Source: criticalflame.org