What is Found There Quotes

“[Poetry] is the liquid voice that can wear through stone.”
― Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

“To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you're reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled. Then, what of the right answers, the so-called multiple-choice examination sheet with the number 2 pencil to mark one choice and one choice only?”
― Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

“We must use what we have to invent what we desire.”
― Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

“Poetry, in its own way, is a carrier of the sparks, because it too comes out of silence, seeking connection with unseen others.”
― Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

“A poem can't free us from the struggle for existence, but it can uncover desires and appetites buried under the accumulating emergencies of our lives, the fabricated wants and needs we have had urged on us, have accepted as our own. It's not a philosophical or psychological blueprint; it's an instrument for embodied experience.”
― Adrienne Rich, What is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics