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"The decision to feed the world
is the real decision. No revolution
has chosen it. For that choice requires
that women shall be free."
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet and feminist. "Hunger," section 4, lines 1-4 (1974-75). |
"We had to take the world as it was given:
The nursemaid sitting passive in the park
Was rarely by a changeling prince accosted,
The mornings happened similar and stark
In rooms of selfhood where we woke and lay
Watching today unfold like yesterday."
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet and feminist. "Ideal Landscape," lines 1-6 (1955). |
"It is the lesbian in us who is creative, for the dutiful daughter of the fathers in us is only a hack."
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet, essayist, and lesbian feminist. "It Is the Lesbian In Us Who Is Creative," (1976). |
"I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake."
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet. I wake up in your bed (Twenty-one Love Poems) (l. 7-9). . .
Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, The. Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, eds. (2d ed., 1988) W. W. Norton & Company. |
"the pull of gravity, which is not simple
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing
air."
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet. I wake up in your bed (Twenty-one Love Poems) (l. 15-16). . .
Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, The. Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, eds. (2d ed., 1988) W. W. Norton & Company. |
"She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime."
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet. Living in Sin (l. 1-4). . .
Norton Anthology of Poetry, The. Alexander W. Allison and others, eds. (3d ed., 1983) W. W. Norton & Company. |
"By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs."
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet. Living in Sin (l. 23-26). . .
Norton Anthology of Poetry, The. Alexander W. Allison and others, eds. (3d ed., 1983) W. W. Norton & Company. |
"In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself."
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet. Paper, June 2, 1978, read at Future of Mothering Conference, Columbus, Ohio. "Motherhood: The Contemporary Emergency and the Quantum Leap," published in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1980). |
"Piece by piece I seem
to re-enter the world: I first began
a small, fixed dot, still see
that old myself, a dark-blue thumbtack
pushed into the scene,
a hard little head protruding
from the pointillist's buzz and bloom."
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet. Necessities of Life (written 1962), published in The Fact of a Doorframe (1974).
Opening lines. |
"One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
to glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill."
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929), U.S. poet and essayist. "North American Time," part 2, lines 8-13 (1983). |
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