Quotes from Adrienne Rich

how can I go on this mission without you you, who might have told me everything you feel is true?

You: a woman too old for passive contemplation caught staring out a window at bird-of-paradise spikes jewelled with rain, across an alley

Listen to a woman groping for language in which to express what is on her mind, sensing the terms of academic discourse are not her language, trying to cut down her thought to the dimensions of a discourse not intended for her (for it is not fitting that a woman speak in public) or reading her paper aloud at breakneck speed, throwing her words away, deprecating her own work by a reflexive prejudgment: I do not deserve to take up time and space.

In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog where we stood, saying I

Finally: there is always that in poetry which will not be grasped, which cannot be described, which survives our ardent attention, our critical theories, our classrooms, our late-night arguments. There is always (I am quoting the poet/translator Américo Ferrari) "an unspeakable where, perhaps, the nucleus of the living relation between the poem and the world resides.

My country wedged fast in history stuck in the ice

Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, visionary or glib, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness. What's pushing the grammar and syntax, the sounds, the images—is it the constriction of literalism, fundamentalism, professionalism—a stunted language? Or is it the great muscle of metaphor, drawing strength from resemblance in difference? The great muscle of the unconstricted throat?

At the onset of labor, the woman was placed in the lithotomy (supine) position, chloroformed, and turned into the completely passive body on which the obstetrician could perform as on a mannequin. The labor room became an operating theatre, and childbirth a medical drama with the physician as its hero.

Women have married because it was necessary, in order to economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women because coming out of 'abnormal' childhoods they wanted to feel 'normal,"and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment

The wave changed instantly by rock; the rock changed by the wave returning over and over.

It's true, these last few years I've lived watching myself in the act of loss—the art of losing, Elizabeth Bishop called it, but for me no art only badly-done exercises acts of the heart forced to question its presumptions in this world its mere excitements acts of the body forced to measure all instincts against pain acts of parting trying to let go without giving up yes Elizabeth a city here a village there a sister, comrade, cat and more no art to this but anger

That conversation we were always on the edge of having, runs on in my head..

They do not fear the men beneath the tree; They pace in sleek chivalric certainty.

If to feel is to be unreliable don't listen to us if to be in pain is to be predictable embittered bullying then don't listen to us If we're in danger of mistaking our personal trouble for the pain on the streets don't listen to us

This beast, this angel is both you and I

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language guessing at some words while others keep you reading and I want to know which words they are.

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn                           between bitterness and hope

A woman in the shape of a monster a monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them

But I knew even then that I did not want my sons to act for me in the world, any more than I wished for them to kill or die for their country. I wanted to act, to live, in myself and to love them for their separate selves.

because even the alphabet is precious.

The mail lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison: My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display they keep me constantly awake with the pain... Do whatever you can to survive. You know, I think that men love wars... And my incurable anger, my unbendable wounds break open further with ears, I am crying helplessly, and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.

Necessity for a more unyielding discipline of my life. Recognize the uselessness of blind anger. Limit society. Use children's school hours better, for work & solitude. Refuse to be distracted from own style o flife. Less waste. Be harder & harder on poems.

When the ideas or forms we need are banished, we seek their residues wherever we can trace them

Over and over, starting to wake I dive back to discover you