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Adrienne Rich Quotes about Art

All Adrienne Rich Quotes Art quotes Assumption Authority Children Choices Consciousness Country Culture Darkness Desire Dignity Feelings Giving Grief Heart History Home Identity Imagination Inspirational Justice Language Liars Life Lying Memories Motherhood Passion Past Poetry Poverty Purpose Reality Responsibility Running Sexuality Silence Sleep Son Soul Struggle Suffering Survival Understanding Violence Vision Wall War Writing

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.

Art, Mean, Dinner Table

Adrienne Rich (2016). “Collected Poems: 1950-2012”, p.36, W. W. Norton & Company

One of the great functions of art is to help us imagine what it is like to be not ourselves, what it is like to be someone or something else, what it is like to live in another skin, what it is like to live in another body, and in that sense to surpass ourselves, to go out beyond ourselves.

Art, Skins, Body

Behind all art is an element of desire...Love of life, of existence, love of another human being, love of human beings is in some way behind all art — even the most angry, even the darkest, even the most grief-stricken, and even the most embittered art has that element somewhere behind it. Because how could you be so despairing, so embittered, if you had not had something you loved that you lost?

Art, Grief, Love Life

In this disintegrative, technologically-manic time, when public language is so debased, poetry continues to matter because it's the art that reintegrates words, speech, voice, breath, music, bodily tempo, and the powers of the imagination.

Art, Voice, Imagination

Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

You have to give your art everything you can - I don't mean only writing, but studying other poets and poetics, thinking, reading what poets have written other than their poetry.

Art, Reading, Writing

As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.

Art, Order, Effort

Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.133, W. W. Norton & Company

There is no simple formula for the relationship of art to justice...In the end, I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope. My concern for my country is inextricable from my concerns as an artist.

Country, Art, Simple

I guess what concerns me always is the need for a field, a rich compost, for any art to flourish. But however isolate or unheard you may feel, if you have the need to write poetry, are compelled to write it, you go on, whether there is resonance or not.

Art, Writing, Needs

Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

There is the falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood. In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Song, Art, Inspiration

Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.117, W. W. Norton & Company

Art, whose honesty must work through artifice, cannot avoid cheating truth.

Cheating, Art, Honesty

I define "politics" as the on-going collective struggle for liberation and for the power to create - not only works of art, but also just and nonviolent social institutions.

Art, Struggle, Social

Source: criticalflame.org

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

Art, Thinking, Dignity

Adrienne Rich (2002). “Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations”, p.52, W. W. Norton & Company

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, Sex, Loneliness

Source: www.english.illinois.edu

I think of poetry as something out there in the world and within each of us. I don't mean that everyone can write poetry - it's an art, a craft, it requires enormous commitment like any art. But there's a core of desire in each of us and poetry goes to and comes from that core. It's the social, economic, institutional gap that makes it difficult.

Art, Writing, Mean

Source: www.paulodacosta.ca

The belief that established science and scholarship--which have so relentlessly excluded women from their making--are "objective"and "value-free" and that feminist studies are "unscholarly," "biased," and "ideological" dies hard. Yet the fact is that all science, and all scholarship, and all art are ideological; there is no neutrality in culture!

Art, Feminist, Culture

Women's art, though created in solitude, wells up out of community. There is, clearly, both enormous hunger for the work thus being diffused, and an explosion of creative energy, bursting through the coercive choicelessness of the system on whose boundaries we are working.

Art, Work, Creative

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.

Art, Wall, Years

Adrienne Rich (1993). “Your Native Land, Your Life”, p.27, W. W. Norton & Company

The channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. The song is higher than the struggle.

Song, Art, Struggle

Adrienne Rich (1994). “Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985”, p.117, W. W. Norton & Company

What I search for continuously in my art is adequate language, language I hope can stand beyond any particular occasion. What I'm finding is that in our increasingly dysfunctional U.S. society, marvelous poetry is being written - out of and amid the dysfunction.

Art, Dysfunction, Adequate

Source: criticalflame.org

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