Adrienne Rich

File:Adrienne Rich, Trumansburg, New York, October 2001.jpg

Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich (born May 16, 1929, in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American feminist, poet, teacher, and writer.

Sourced

• Women's Studies can amount simply to compensatory history; too often they fail to challenge the intellectual and political structures that must be challenged if women as a group are ever to come into collective, nonexclusionary freedom.
  • Blood, Bread and Poetry, ch. 1 (1986)

• 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.
  • As quoted in Ms. magazine, p. 44 (September 1979)

• No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness.
  • Blood, Bread and Poetry, ch. 1 (1986)

• The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents' memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.
  • What Is Found There, ch. 11 (1993)

• False history gets made all day, any day,
  the truth of the new is never on the news
  False history gets written every day...
  The lesbian archaeologist watches herself
  sifting her own life out from the shards she's piecing,
  asking the clay all questions but her own.
  • Turning the Wheel, section 2 (1981)

External links

• Adrienne Rich's lecture agent
• Complete text of Rich's letter of refusal for the National Medal for the Arts, 1997
• Academy of American Poets Page
• Groundbreaking Books: Diving Into the Wreck
• Rich's letter of refusal for the National Medal for the Arts, 1997
• Audio interview of Adrienne Rich, 1987, by Don Swaim of CBS Radio, RealAudio
• A rich life. Adrienne Rich on poetry, politics, and personal revelation - interview by Michael Klein, The Boston Phoenix, 1999.
• Essay on Rich and other poets
• Biography and links to poems
• Modern American Poets page
• Audio recordings at PennSound
• Legislators of the world essay from November 18, 2006 ed. of The Guardian, with the subtitle: "In our dark times we need poetry more than ever, argues Adrienne Rich"