Quotes from Adrienne Rich

Poetry never stood a chance of standing outside history.

Who neither touched nor spoke? whose nape, whose finger-ends nervelessly lied the hours away?

I do not know who I was when I did those things or who I said I was or whether I willed to feel what I had read about or who in fact was there with me or whether I knew, even then that there was doubt about these things

If I could let you know - two women together is a work nothing in civilization ha made simple, two people together is a work heroic in its ordinariness, the slow-picked, halting traverse of a pitch where the fiercest attention becomes routine - look at the faces of those who have chosen it.

Theory -the seeing of patterns, showing the forest as well as the trees- theory can be a dew that rises from earth and collects in the rain cloud and returns to earth over and over. But if it doesn't smell of the earth, it isn't good for earth. -Notes Toward a Politics of Location

We need poetry as living language, the core of every language, something that is still spoken, aloud or in the mind, muttered in secret, subversive, reaching around corners, crumpled into a pocket, performed to a community, read aloud to the dying, recited by heart, scratched or sprayed on a wall. That kind of language.

I would have loved to live in a world of women and men gaily in collusion with green leaves, stalks, building mineral cities, transparent domes, little huts of woven grass each with its own pattern— a conspiracy to coexist with the Crab Nebula, the exploding universe, the Mind—

Can you remember? When we thought the poets taught how to live?

Well, she's long about her coming, who must be more merciless to herself than history. Her mind full to the wind, I see her plunge breasted and glancing through the currents, taking the light upon her at least as beautiful as any boy or helicopter, poised, still coming, her fine blades making the air wince but her cargo no promise then: delivered palpable ours.

With whom do you believe your lot is cast? From where does your strength come? I think somehow, somewhere every poem of mine must repeat those questions which are not the same. There is a whom , a where that is not chosen that is given and sometimes falsely given in the beginning we grasp whatever we can to survive

The woman who cherished her suffering is dead. I am her descendant. I love the scar-tissue she handed on to me, but I want to go on from here with you fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.

I never asked you to explain that act of violence what dazed me was our ignorance of our will to hurt each other.

sleep comes hard. I'd rather lie awake and read.

A cave of scars! ancient, archaic wallpaper built up, layer on layer from the earliest, dream-white to yesterday's, a red-black scrawl a red mouth slowly closing

there are ways of thinking that we don't know about. Nothing could be more important or precious than that knowledge, however unborn. The sense of urgency, the spiritual restlessness it engenders, cannot be appeased . . . —Susan Son tag, Styles of Radical Will

Freedom. It isn't once, to walk out under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers of light, the fields of dark--freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering. Putting together inch by inch the starry worlds. From all the lost collections.

Tongue on your words to taste you there Couldn't   read what you had never written there Played your message over feeling bad Played your message over it was all I had To tell me what and wherefore this is what it said: I'm tired of you asking me why I'm tired of words like the chatter of birds Give me a pass, let me just get by

The moment the feeling enters the body is political.

And yet, protest it if we will, Some corner of the mind retains The medieval man, who still Keeps watch upon those starry skeins And drives us out of doors at night To gaze at anagrams of light.

Driving the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge no monument's in sight but fog prowling Angel Island muffling Alcatraz poems in Cantonese inscribed on fog no icon lifts a lamp here history's breath blotting the air over Gold Mountain

The living, politicized woman claims to be a person whether she is attached to a family or not, whether she is attached to a man or not, whether she is a mother or not.

There is nothing North Americans seem to fear so much as manipulation, probably because at some level we know that we belong to a deeply manipulative system.

I want to crawl into her for refuge lay my head in the space between her breast and shoulder abnegating power for love as women have done

Memory says: Want to do right? Don't count on me.