Adrienne Rich

Poems are like dreams: in them you put what you don't know you know.

Victories turned inside outBut no surrenderCemeteries of remorseThe beaten champion sobbingGhosts move in to shield his tears

We may feel bitterly how little our poems can do in the face of seemingly out of control technological power and seemingly limitless corporate greed, yet it has always been true that poetry can break isolation, show us to ourselves when we are outlawed or made invisible, remind us of beauty where no beauty seems possible, remind us kinship where all is represented as separation.", The Nation, October 7, 1996)

For now, poetry has the capacity - in its own ways and by its own means - to remind us of something we are forbidden to see.

the phantom of the man-who-would-understand,the lost brother, the twin ---for him did we leave our mothers,deny our sisters, over and over?did we invent him, conjure himover the charring log,nights, late, in the snowbound cabindid we dream or scry his facein the liquid embers,the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us?It was never the rapist:it was the brother, lost,the comrade/twin whose palmwould bear a lifeline like our own:decisive, arrowy,forked-lightning of insatiate desireIt was never the crude pestle, the blindramrod we were after:merely a fellow-creaturewith natural resources equal to our own.

Love, our subject:we've trained it like ivy to our walls.

and I ask myself and you, which of our visions will claim uswhich will we claimhow will we go on livinghow will we touch, what will we knowwhat will we say to each other.

I choose to love this time for oncewith all my intelligence-from "Splittings

...you look at me like an emergency

I touch you knowing we weren't born tomorrow,and somehow, each of us will help the other live,and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.

The dead_ we say___as if speakingof __he people_ whogave up on making historysimply to get throughSomething dense and null___groanwithout echo___undergroundand owl-voiced I cry Whoare these dead people theselovers who if ever didlisten no longer answer: We :

The friend I can trust is the one who will let me have my death.The rest are actors who want me to stay and further the plot.

I question the more or less psychoanalytic perspective that the male need to control women sexually results from some primal male "fear of women" and of women's sexual insatiability. It seems more probable that men really fear, not that they will have women's sexual appetites forced on them, or that women want to smother and devour them, but that women could be indifferent to them altogether, that men could be allowed sexual and emotional-therefore economic-access to women only on women's terms, otherwise being left on the periphery of the matrix.

There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.

A language is a map of our failures

I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail.

When I talk of taking a trip I mean forever.