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Adrienne Rich Biography

Adrienne Cecile Rich (/ædriːɛn/;[lacks stress] May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist and radical feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."

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Adrienne Rich Quotes

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

Life, Live, Poetry, Remember, Taught, Thought

The suppressed lesbian I had been carrying in me since adolescence began to stretch her limbs.

Adolescence, Limbs, Sexuality, Stretch, Suppressed

I don't trust them but I'm learning to use them.

Don'T Trust, Learning, Trust, Use

Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one of which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one of which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are here for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement.

Deepest, Energy, Giving, Nothing, Painful, Two

I choose to love this time for once with all my intelligence -from "Splittings

Choose, Intelligence, Love, Splitting, Splittings, Time

The impulse to create begins - often terribly and fearfully - in a tunnel of silence. Every real poem is the breaking of an existing silence, and the first question we might ask any poem is, What kind of voice is breaking silence, and what kind of silence is being broken?

Breaking, Create, Fearfully, Real, Tunnels, Voice

The moment when a feeling enters the body
is political. This touch is political

Body, Feelings, Moment, Political, Touch

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.

Change, Light, People, Personal, Rejecting, See

I am suspicious - first of all, in myself - of adopted mysticisms of glib spirituality, above all of white people's tendency to. . . vampirize American Indian, or African, or Asian, or other 'exotic' ways of understanding.

People, Spirituality, Understanding, White

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.

Birth, Children, Growing Up, Menses, War, Women

The decision to feed the world is the real decision. No revolution has chosen it. For that choice requires that women shall be free.

Choice, Choices, Decision, Real, Revolution

It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness

Bitter, Blissful, Nerves, Resentment, Suffering

If the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at the moment.

Alternatives, Challenges, Conceive, Imagination, Transcend

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.

Associated, Kinds, Magic, People, Periods, Violence

Pride is a tricky, glorious, double-edged feeling.

Feeling, Feelings, Glorious, Inspirational, Pride, Tricky

Art and literature have given so many people the relief of feeling connected - pulled us out of isolation. It has let us know that somebody else breathed and dreamed and had sex and loved and raged and knew loneliness the way we do.

Art, Given, Loneliness, People, Sex

As a very young poet, I had been brought up on that dogma that politics was bad for poetry.

Brought, Dogma, Poet, Young

I'd call it love if love didn't take so many years but lust too is a jewel.

Call, Jewel, Jewels, Love, Sex, Years

The kind of poetry that interests me is intellectual and moral and political and sexual and sensual - all of that fermenting together. It can speak to people who have themselves felt like monsters and say: you are not alone, this is not monstrous. It can disturb and enrapture.

Enrapture, Intellectual, Moral, People, Political, Speak

Experience is always larger than language.

Experience, Language, Larger

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