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

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When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
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As her sons have seen her: the mother in patriarchy: controlling, erotic, castrating, heart-suffering, guilt-ridden, and guilt-provoking a marble brow, a huge breast, an avid cave between her legs snakes, swamp-grass, or teeth on her lap a helpless infant or a martyred son. She exists for one purpose: to bear and nourish the son.
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The moment when a feeling enters the body/ is political. This touch is political
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Women have always been seen as waiting: waited to be asked, waiting for our menses, in fear lest they do or do not come, waiting for men to come home from wars, or from work, waiting for children to grow up, or for the birth of a new child, or for menopause.
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Life on the planet is born of woman.
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To write as if your life depended on it to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public the words you have dredged sieved up in dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence-- words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
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Poetry is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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Poetry can open locked chambers of possibiity, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.
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For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.
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To work and suffer is to be at home. All else is scenery.
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In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger.
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To become a token woman - whether you win the Nobel Prize or merely get tenure at the cost of denying your sisters - is to become something less than a man... since men are loyal at least to their own world-view, their laws of brotherhood and self-interest.
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No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air, dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, our animal passion rooted in the city.
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Only to have a grief equal to all these tears!
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There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors.
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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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I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.
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... in a history of spiritual rupture, a social compact built on fantasy and collective secrets, poetry becomes more necessary than ever: it keeps the underground aquifers flowing it is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.
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We move but our words stand become responsible for more than we intended and this is verbal privilege
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