“Someone is writing a poem. Words are being set down in a force field. It’s as if the words themselves have magnetic charges; they veer together or in polarity, they swerve against each other. Part of the force field, the charge, is the working history of the words themselves, how someone has known them, used them, doubted and relied on them in a life.”—Adrienne Rich, excerpt from essay “Someone is Writing a Poem” (Poetry Foundation, May 12, 2010)
Posts tagged Adrienne Rich:
Delta
If you have taken this rubble for my past
raking though it for fragments you could sell
know that I long ago moved on
deeper into the heart of the matter
If you think you can grasp me, think again:
my story flows in more than one direction
a delta springing from the riverbed
with its five fingers spread
—Adrienne Rich, from Time’s Power: Poems 1985-1988 (W. W. Norton & Co., 1989)
Photograph: Brian Brown, Altamaha River Delta, n.d.
But poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.
—Adrienne Rich, When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision
(Source: thislongingforyou, via rimeswriting)
But most often someone writing a poem believes in, depends on, a delicate, vibrating range of difference, that an “I” can become a “we” without extinguishing others, that a partly common language exists to which strangers can bring their own heartbeat, memories, images. A language that itself has learned from the heartbeat, memories, images of strangers.
—Adrienne Rich, from “Someone is Writing a Poem”
(Source: rimeswriting, via rimeswriting)
I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton’s. People suffer highly in poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is burning. I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor’s language.
——Adrienne Rich, from “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children” (via rimeswriting)
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself
I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped
or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down
the red coals more extreme, more curious
in their flashing and dying
than you wish they were
sitting long after midnight
—Adrienne Rich, “For the Dead” (via awritersruminations)
“A lot is being said today about the influence that the myths and images of women have on all of us who are products of culture. I think it has been a peculiar confusion to the girl or woman who tries to write because she is peculiarly susceptible to language. She goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she too has been putting words and images together; she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over in the ‘words’ masculine persuasive force’ of literature she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men.”
—Adrienne Rich, from the essay “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (W. W. Norton & Co., 1979)
When I think of a landscape I am thinking of a time.
When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.
I could say: those mountains have a meaning
but further than that I could not say.
—Adrienne Rich, from “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning” (via proustitute)
(via electrichoney)
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