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What I discerned in the U.S. was a convergence of poetic voices coming from many different rents in the social fabric, many cultures, many tributaries, which, together, make up the American poetry of the late twentieth century.

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
Make
Century
Twentieth
American
Cultures
Voice
Poetic
Culture
Fabric
Social
Voices
Tributaries
Together
Poetry
Rents
Many
Late
Discerned
Different
Coming
Convergence

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The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.
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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.
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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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The liar often suffers from amnesia. Amnesia is the silence of the unconscious.
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If you think you can grasp me, think again: my story flows in more than one direction, a delta springing from the river bed with its five fingers spread.
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When someone, let's say a teacher, speaks of the world and you are not in it, it's like looking into the mirror and seeing nothing.
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The serious revolutionary, like the serious artist, can't afford to lead a sentimental or self-deceiving life.
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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.
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... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars to escape writing of the worst thing of all-- not the crimes of other, not even our own death, but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
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A decade of cutting away dead flesh, cauterizing old scars ripped open over and over and still it is not enough.
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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.
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In a world where language and naming are power, silence is oppression, is violence.
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When my dreams showed signs of becoming politically correct no unruly images escaping beyond borders ... then I began to wonder
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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.
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The worker can unionize, go out on strike mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by compassionate bonds our wildcat strikes have most often taken the form of physical or mental breakdown.
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Despair, when not the response to absolute physical and moral defeat is, like war, the failure of imagination.
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I define politics as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.
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The words are purposes./The words are maps./I came to see the damage that was done/and the treasures that prevail.
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Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.
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When someone with the authority of a teacher describes the world and you’re not in it, there’s a moment of psychic disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw nothing.
Adrienne Rich