Adrienne Rich
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
Narrowed-down by her early editors and anthologists, reduced to quaintness or spinsterish oddity by many of her commentators, sentimentalized, fallen-in-love with like some gnomic Garbo, still unread in the breadth and depth of her full range of work, she was, and is, a wonder to me when I try to imagine myself into that mind.
—Adrienne Rich, "Vesuvius at Home: The Power of Emily Dickinson," from On Lies, Sec, 1980
Posted on July 3, 2002 at 9:19 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
We might hypothetically possess ourselves of every technological resource on the North American continent, but as long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in the old cycles, our process may be "revolutionary" but not transformative.
—Adrienne Rich, Power and Danger: Works of a Common Woman
Posted on July 29, 2003 at 9:09 PM
WORDS ABOUT WORDS
No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.
—Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language, 1978
Posted on March 25, 2003 at 7:47 AM
|
