Adrienne Rich Quotes

I never think about poetry except when I'm writing it. I mean my poetry.

This is how it always is when I finish a poem. A great silence overcomes me and I wonder why I ever thought to use language.

If you are silent through meditation, utterly silent, suddenly you feel a tremendous urge to create something.

[The poets' role is that of] capturing on their instruments the secret stir of life in the air and giving it voice in the music of prophecy

The artist in his calling of interpreter creates because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death

The poet produces the beautiful by fixing his attention on something real.

I do not remember-that is the point-the first impulse that pumped and shoved most of the earlier poems along, and they are still too near me, with their vehement beat-pounding black and green rhythms like those of a very young policeman exploding, for me to see the written evidence of it.

The typewriter is holy the poem is holy the voice is holy the hearers are holy the ecstacy is holy!

There's a weighing kind of overemphasis on sexuality, which disempowers music generally, because it silences all the other voices; it makes music a very powerless force for changing the world.

A terrible violence of creation,A flash into the burning heart of the abominable;Yet if we wait, unafraid, beyond the fearful instant,The burning lake turns into a forest pool,The fire subsides into rings of water,A sunlit silence.

Before music there was silence and the duet format allows you to build from the silence in a very special way.

The desire to create is one of the deepest yearnings of the human soul. No matter our talents, education, backgrounds, or abilities, we each have an inherent wish to create something that did not exist before. Creation brings satisfaction and fulfillment. We develop ourselves and others when we take organized matter into our hands and mold it into something of beauty.

The poets are nothing but interpreters of the gods, each one possessed by the divinity to whom he is in bondage.

For me, a poet is someone who is 'in contact.' Someone through whom a current is passing.

Imagination in poetry, as distinguished from mere fancy is the transfiguring of the real or actual to the ideal.

The deity on purpose [sings] the liveliest of all lyrics through the most miserable poet.

Love is the sole impulse for creation; and the man who does not have it as the greatest incentive in his life has never developed the real creative instinct. No one can swing out into the Universal without love, for the whole universe is based upon it.

History has proven that it's impossible to crush the artist. There's always gonna be a need for somebody to write a poem or sing a song about something, about life - that makes it real. There's the word that goes beyond the word.

Real guts are nothing more than developing your inner voice to the point where it is louder and stronger than the voice of your fear.

Our poets are men of talents who sing, and not the children of music.

I decide every day that I love Creativity enough to accept that Fear will always come with it. And I talk to Fear all the time, speaking to it with love and respect, saying to it: “I know that you are Fear, and that your job is to be afraid. And you do your job really well! I will never ask you to leave me alone or to be silent, because you have a right to speak your own voice, and I know that you will never leave me alone or be silent, anyhow. But I need you to understand that I will always choose Creativity over you.

Natural emotion is the soul of poetry, as melody is of music; the same faults are engendered by over-study of either art; there is a lack of sincerity, of irresistible impulse in both the poet and the, composer.

Railing in other men may be a crime, But ought to pass for mere instinct in him: Instinct he follows and no further knows, For to write verse with him is to transprose.

Man is made to create, from the poet to the potter.