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I do not think [poetry] is more, or less, necessary than food, shelter, health, education, decent working conditions. It is as necessary.

Adrienne Rich

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Adrienne Rich
Age: 82 †
Born: 1929
Born: May 16
Died: 2012
Died: March 27
Essayist
Feminist
Peace Activist
Poet
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Adrienne Cecile Rich
Adrienne Cécile Rich
Adrienne Riche
Conditions
Health
Food
Education
Shelter
Working
Decent
Less
Necessary
Think
Poet
Thinking
Poetry

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I feel more helpless with you than without you.
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There is no 'the truth,' 'a truth'--truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity.
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The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are objectiveand value-free and that feminist studies are unscholarly, biased, and ideological dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological there is no neutrality in
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...you look at me like an emergency
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We see daily that our lives are terrible and little, without continuity, buyable and salable at any moment, mere blips on a screen, that this is the way we live now. Memory marketed as nostalgia terror reduced to mere suspense, to melodrama.
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Love, our subject: we've trained it like ivy to our walls.
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The dialectic between change and continuity is a painful but deeply instructive one, in personal life as in the life of a people.To see the light too often has meant rejecting the treasures found in darkness.
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But before we were mothers, we have been, first of all, women, with actual bodies and actual minds.
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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.
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What would it mean to live in a city whose people were changing each other's despair into hope?-- You yourself must change it.
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A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you... where and when and how you are living and might live, it is a wick of desire.
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... passion for survival is the great theme of women's poetry.
Adrienne Rich
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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
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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.
Adrienne Rich
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We must use what we have to invent what we desire.
Adrienne Rich
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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.
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and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim us which will we claim how will we go on living how will we touch, what will we know what will we say to each other.
Adrienne Rich
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I long to create something that can't be used to keep us passive: I want to write a script about plumbing, how every pipe is joined to every other.
Adrienne Rich
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In order to live a fully human life we require not only control of our bodies (though control is a prerequisite) we must touch the unity and resonance of our physicality, our bond with the natural order, the corporeal grounds of our intelligence.
Adrienne Rich
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Sleeping. Turning in turn like planets rotating in their midnight meadow: a touch is enough to let us know we're not alone in the universe, even in sleep.
Adrienne Rich