Adrienne Rich
National Book Award
1974
Bollingen Prize
2003
2010
Adrienne Cecile Rich (May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) was an American poet, essayist and feminist. She was called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century", and was credited with bringing "the oppression of women and lesbians to the forefront of poetic discourse."
Her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected by the senior poet W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award; he went on to write the introduction to the published volume. Rich famously declined the National Medal of Arts, protesting the United States House of Representatives and Speaker Gingrich's vote to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Read more about Adrienne Rich: Selected Awards and Honors
Famous quotes by adrienne rich:
“behind dry lips
a loaded gun.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“I long to create something
that can’t be used to keep us passive:
I want to write
a script about plumbing, how every pipe
is joined
to every other.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“A revolutionary poem will not tell you who or when to kill, what and when to burn, or even how to theorize. It reminds you ... where and when and how you are living and might live—it is a wick of desire.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Poetry is above all a concentration of the power of language, which is the power of our ultimate relationship to everything in the universe.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“... I am an instrument in the shape/of a woman trying to translate pulsations/into images for the relief of the body/and the reconstruction of the mind.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)