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Over many years so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me - it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry.

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
Read
Hardly
Sense
Touched
Makes
Poet
Many
Poetry
Paths
Great
Deal
Opened
Years
Deals
Poets
Always
Path
List
Imagination
Lists

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No one sleeps in this room without the dream of a common language.
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The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.
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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.
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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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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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Whatever happens with us, your body will haunt mine
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Language is power... Language can be used as a means of changing reality.
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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.
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These scars bear witness but whether to repair or to destruction I no longer know.
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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.
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Any woman's death diminishes me.
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War is an absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political.
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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.
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Lying is done with words and also with silence.
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In the interstices of language lie powerful secrets of the culture.
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I am a woman in the prime of my life, with certain powers and those powers severely limited by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
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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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