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El sueño de una lengua común
La poesía ha sido en todo tiempo un gesto de rebeldía y de emancipación. Todos los poetas soñaron alguna vez que las palabras tenían un poder tan grande que con ellas serían capaces de acometer la transformación de los sistemas políticos, acabar con la sinrazón y crear una justicia verdadera. Adrienne Rich, una de las poetas estadounidenses más populares y celebradas del siglo xx, también soñó con el fin de la desgracia humana y con la instauración de una nueva armonía. Todo su combate contra la opresión de las mujeres lo concentró en las palabras: en redefinirlas, en darles un nuevo uso, un nuevo sentido, donde toda la historia de violencia contra ellas fuese juzgada y reescrita.
El sueño de una lengua común es uno de sus libros más emblemáticos, el poemario en el que su combate y sus ideas encontraron su punto más alto y más claro. En él habla del poder de las mujeres, de los amores entre ellas, hermosos y prohibidos, y retoma una de las metáforas más antiguas de la tradición literaria: la naturaleza y su semejanza con el cuerpo femenino. Pero sobre todo es un libro que cuestiona la opresión y el silencio de las mujeres, y que imagina lo que sólo los grandes poetas han soñado: la creación de una lengua común que permita comprendernos de forma verdadera, sin herirnos, sin violentarnos, donde la existencia no sea una batalla entre todos nosotros sino la afirmación de una nueva armonía, entre hombres y mujeres, entre el ser humano y la naturaleza, una lengua para soñar por fin juntos nuestra humanidad común.
El sueño de una lengua común es uno de sus libros más emblemáticos, el poemario en el que su combate y sus ideas encontraron su punto más alto y más claro. En él habla del poder de las mujeres, de los amores entre ellas, hermosos y prohibidos, y retoma una de las metáforas más antiguas de la tradición literaria: la naturaleza y su semejanza con el cuerpo femenino. Pero sobre todo es un libro que cuestiona la opresión y el silencio de las mujeres, y que imagina lo que sólo los grandes poetas han soñado: la creación de una lengua común que permita comprendernos de forma verdadera, sin herirnos, sin violentarnos, donde la existencia no sea una batalla entre todos nosotros sino la afirmación de una nueva armonía, entre hombres y mujeres, entre el ser humano y la naturaleza, una lengua para soñar por fin juntos nuestra humanidad común.
170 pages, Paperback
First published December 31, 1978
About the author
Adrienne Rich
132 books1,422 followersWorks, notably
Diving into the Wreck
(1973), of American poet and essayist Adrienne Rich champion such causes as pacifism, feminism, and civil rights for gays and lesbians.
A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation in such works as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971). In Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), she continued to experiment with form and to deal with the experiences and aspirations of women from a feminist perspective.
In addition to her poetry, Rich has published many essays on poetry, feminism, motherhood, and lesbianism. Her recent collections include An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995 (1995).
A mother bore Adrienne Cecile Rich, a feminist, to a middle-class family with parents, who educated her until she entered public school in the fourth grade. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Radcliffe college in 1951, the same year of her first book of poems, A Change of World. That volume, chosen by W. H. Auden for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and her next, The Diamond Cutters and Other Poems (1955), earned her a reputation as an elegant, controlled stylist.
In the 1960s, however, Rich began a dramatic shift away from her earlier mode as she took up political and feminist themes and stylistic experimentation in such works as Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law (1963), The Necessities of Life (1966), Leaflets (1969), and The Will to Change (1971). In Diving into the Wreck (1973) and The Dream of a Common Language (1978), she continued to experiment with form and to deal with the experiences and aspirations of women from a feminist perspective.
In addition to her poetry, Rich has published many essays on poetry, feminism, motherhood, and lesbianism. Her recent collections include An Atlas of the Difficult World (1991) and Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991–1995 (1995).
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October 30, 2018
It's cold and gray, where I am this morning, and it also happens to be the anniversary of my father's death.
My dad passed away on this day, four years ago, and, in the moment that I received the news in a phone call, I felt a piece of my heart shatter off from the whole, and I am wise enough now to know that it will never heal.
We don't know, until it actually happens to us, that we don't ever truly heal from that level of heartbreak. We also don't ever stop missing someone who was that beloved to us. We eventually get on with the daily business of living, even thrive again, but we never stop wanting the conversation, the cleverness, or the counsel of the person missing from the room.
So are we broken? Yes, of course we are. We all are.
My father was as broken as the next guy, but he was also the man who taught me to read and taught me to sit out on the porch with a hot cup of tea, waiting for the UFOs to arrive. Through him, I learned to love Doctor Who, Rod Serling and Ray Bradbury, and while he dreamed of alien abduction, I studied him, and read and wrote fantasy instead.
Dad was a pensive man, with a lovely baritone voice, and he was playful, often crooning in his affection toward me, but he made one mistake with me, over and over again. He didn't take me seriously. . . because I was a girl.
I would come to him, beginning at age 7, with my writing journal, filled with my short stories and poems, and the neighborhood newspaper I'd started and he wouldn't read any of my work. He'd just chuckle, give a gentle shake to my shoulder and laugh and say how cute I was.
When I told him I wanted to write, more than anything else, he'd say, “But all you need to be is pretty.”
When I got older and I informed him I was going to college, he answered, “Honey, a girl as pretty as you are doesn't need to go to college.” He not only didn't acknowledge my academic pursuits, he didn't pay for them, either.
Even knee-deep into my marriage, when I spoke to my father of my professional ambitions, the conversations always turned into, “But you're so pretty, and you're all taken care of, just like I always knew you would be.”
In my 40th year, my father finally read a blog post of mine and called me that day, crying, and said, “Honey, you're a writer. I'm sorry I didn't know.”
From that day on, he started every morning with his signature cup of tea and some material that I'd written. He read through my essays, my short stories, he even read my poetry (which was shocking and uncomfortable for both of us, at first).
He validated my artistic pursuits in the final years before he died, and it was cathartic for us both.
Unfortunately, like Adrienne Rich, I still spent the first half of my life feeling invalidated and overly private about what I truly wanted. To this day, I still “look at my face in the glass, and see a halfborn woman.”
It's so hard to be a woman, especially when the old messages still resonate with us. . . we need to be a good girl, a pretty girl, then a wife (and a desirable wife, no less) and a mother, and a good mother, a devoted mother. . . and what else? That part seems to get left off the sentence.
What about our artistry? Our dreams? Our desired professions? What if we don't want to become a wife or a mother?
We're still stumbling over both big pieces of identity: wife/mother, and/or artist/professional? Very few of us will have both, and rarely at the same time. And what's okay, and what's not okay to do?
Ms. Rich wrote once in an essay, “We need to understand the power and the powerlessness embodied in motherhood in patriarchal culture.”
The power and the powerlessness.
There's an ebb and flow to womanhood that can help us surge up toward greatness or drown us, in an undertow. And, as Ms. Rich writes in this collection, “a lifetime is too narrow to understand it.”
I can not sum up my experience in one simple reading response to this poetry (and I will be reading a lot more of Adrienne Rich, especially her essays), but, please, whether you're a man or a woman, do my father and me one favor: don't invalidate your daughters. Whether they're physically pretty or not, could you focus instead on their courage, their passion, their intelligence, their creativity?
They're going to need all of the support they can get.
No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
My dad passed away on this day, four years ago, and, in the moment that I received the news in a phone call, I felt a piece of my heart shatter off from the whole, and I am wise enough now to know that it will never heal.
We don't know, until it actually happens to us, that we don't ever truly heal from that level of heartbreak. We also don't ever stop missing someone who was that beloved to us. We eventually get on with the daily business of living, even thrive again, but we never stop wanting the conversation, the cleverness, or the counsel of the person missing from the room.
So are we broken? Yes, of course we are. We all are.
My father was as broken as the next guy, but he was also the man who taught me to read and taught me to sit out on the porch with a hot cup of tea, waiting for the UFOs to arrive. Through him, I learned to love Doctor Who, Rod Serling and Ray Bradbury, and while he dreamed of alien abduction, I studied him, and read and wrote fantasy instead.
Dad was a pensive man, with a lovely baritone voice, and he was playful, often crooning in his affection toward me, but he made one mistake with me, over and over again. He didn't take me seriously. . . because I was a girl.
I would come to him, beginning at age 7, with my writing journal, filled with my short stories and poems, and the neighborhood newspaper I'd started and he wouldn't read any of my work. He'd just chuckle, give a gentle shake to my shoulder and laugh and say how cute I was.
When I told him I wanted to write, more than anything else, he'd say, “But all you need to be is pretty.”
When I got older and I informed him I was going to college, he answered, “Honey, a girl as pretty as you are doesn't need to go to college.” He not only didn't acknowledge my academic pursuits, he didn't pay for them, either.
Even knee-deep into my marriage, when I spoke to my father of my professional ambitions, the conversations always turned into, “But you're so pretty, and you're all taken care of, just like I always knew you would be.”
In my 40th year, my father finally read a blog post of mine and called me that day, crying, and said, “Honey, you're a writer. I'm sorry I didn't know.”
From that day on, he started every morning with his signature cup of tea and some material that I'd written. He read through my essays, my short stories, he even read my poetry (which was shocking and uncomfortable for both of us, at first).
He validated my artistic pursuits in the final years before he died, and it was cathartic for us both.
Unfortunately, like Adrienne Rich, I still spent the first half of my life feeling invalidated and overly private about what I truly wanted. To this day, I still “look at my face in the glass, and see a halfborn woman.”
It's so hard to be a woman, especially when the old messages still resonate with us. . . we need to be a good girl, a pretty girl, then a wife (and a desirable wife, no less) and a mother, and a good mother, a devoted mother. . . and what else? That part seems to get left off the sentence.
What about our artistry? Our dreams? Our desired professions? What if we don't want to become a wife or a mother?
We're still stumbling over both big pieces of identity: wife/mother, and/or artist/professional? Very few of us will have both, and rarely at the same time. And what's okay, and what's not okay to do?
Ms. Rich wrote once in an essay, “We need to understand the power and the powerlessness embodied in motherhood in patriarchal culture.”
The power and the powerlessness.
There's an ebb and flow to womanhood that can help us surge up toward greatness or drown us, in an undertow. And, as Ms. Rich writes in this collection, “a lifetime is too narrow to understand it.”
I can not sum up my experience in one simple reading response to this poetry (and I will be reading a lot more of Adrienne Rich, especially her essays), but, please, whether you're a man or a woman, do my father and me one favor: don't invalidate your daughters. Whether they're physically pretty or not, could you focus instead on their courage, their passion, their intelligence, their creativity?
They're going to need all of the support they can get.
No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practicing till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
May 26, 2014
This apartment full of books could crack open
to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes
of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face
the underside of everything you’ve loved—
the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag
even the best voices have had to mumble through,
the silence burying unwanted children—
women, deviants, witnesses—in desert sand.
Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books
so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;
yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift
loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind,
Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,
and the ghosts—their hands clasped for centuries—
of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life—this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.
to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes
of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face
the underside of everything you’ve loved—
the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag
even the best voices have had to mumble through,
the silence burying unwanted children—
women, deviants, witnesses—in desert sand.
Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books
so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;
yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift
loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind,
Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,
and the ghosts—their hands clasped for centuries—
of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life—this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.
October 31, 2018
Rich is one of my favorite poets, and there are few words to describe how beautiful and thoughtful these poems are. This slim volume is divided into three sections, "Power," "Twenty-One Love Poems," and "Not Somewhere Else, But Here." This is one of her later collections, written after receiving the National Book Award, and is remarkable for it's openness in writing about sexuality, power and violence against women.
"Twenty-One Love Poems" is perfection, a distilled experience of a relationship arc, and XVII is permanently etched on my consciousness. It begins:
"No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love."
I've read it almost as many times as "Origins and History of Consciousness," in the "Power" group, and find it is sheer excellence of how a writer strives to interpret self and other:
"No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.
Thinking of lovers, their blind faith, their
experienced crucifixions,
my envy is not simple."
"Cartographies of Silence" also stands out. To me, Rich is at her best writing about language, identity and love, and virtually every line floors me.
"Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed"
The remainder of the poems are somewhat uneven for me, especially the "Not Somewhere Else" section, which seem to be primarily odes and center around specific people. They provide interesting insight into both Rich and the time period she writes in, particularly the poem for Audre Lorde. I could probably leave this in my GR "currently reading" shelves indefinitely, as I periodically revisit it, each time finding more to appreciate. If I'm headed for a writing sabbatical, this is one that always gets stuffed in the backpack.
Adrienne, you will be dearly missed.
"Twenty-One Love Poems" is perfection, a distilled experience of a relationship arc, and XVII is permanently etched on my consciousness. It begins:
"No one's fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we're not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love."
I've read it almost as many times as "Origins and History of Consciousness," in the "Power" group, and find it is sheer excellence of how a writer strives to interpret self and other:
"No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.
Thinking of lovers, their blind faith, their
experienced crucifixions,
my envy is not simple."
"Cartographies of Silence" also stands out. To me, Rich is at her best writing about language, identity and love, and virtually every line floors me.
"Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed"
The remainder of the poems are somewhat uneven for me, especially the "Not Somewhere Else" section, which seem to be primarily odes and center around specific people. They provide interesting insight into both Rich and the time period she writes in, particularly the poem for Audre Lorde. I could probably leave this in my GR "currently reading" shelves indefinitely, as I periodically revisit it, each time finding more to appreciate. If I'm headed for a writing sabbatical, this is one that always gets stuffed in the backpack.
Adrienne, you will be dearly missed.
August 23, 2019
(whispers in lesbian) thanks
May 20, 2020
Amé el mundo femenino, las dificultades con las que me identifico, el amor, la naturaleza, que reinan en el mundo de Adrienne Rich. Un libro para tener a mano y seguir leyendo mucho.
February 28, 2020
Me he enamorado perdidamente de la poesía de esta mujer, y he descubierto que sí puedo disfrutar de la poesía y entenderla y llorarla y por supuesto, recomendárosla.
LEED A ADRIENNE.
LEED A ADRIENNE.
May 31, 2020
An intimate collection of poetry that explores the feminine. A wonderful collection that hasn't lost its impact over time.
January 29, 2009
Origins and History of Consciousness
I.
Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon
sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall,
dissected, their bird-wings severed
like trophies. No one lives in this room
without living through some kind of crisis.
No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.
Thinking of lovers, their bind faith, their
experienced crucifixions,
my envy is not simple. I have dreamed of going to bed
as walking into clear water ringed by a snowy wood
white as cold sheets, thinking, I’ll freeze in there.
My bare feet are numbed already by the snow
but the water
is mild, I sink and float
like a warm amphibious animal
that has broken the net, has run
through fields of snow leaving no print;
this water washes off the scent—
You are clear now
of the hunter, the trapper
the wardens of the mind—
yet the warm animal dreams on
of another animal
swimming under the snow-flecked surface of the pool,
and wakes, and sleeps again.
No one sleeps in this room without
the dream of a common language.
II.
It was simple to meet you, simple to take your eyes
into mine, saying: these are eyes I have known
from the first…. It was simple to touch you
against the hacked background, the grain of what we
had been, the choices, years…. It was even simple
to take each other’s lives in our hands, as bodies.
What is not simple: to wake from drowning
from where the ocean beat inside us like an afterbirth
into this common, acute particularity
these two selves who walked half a lifetime untouching—
to wake to something deceptively simple: a glass
sweated with dew, a ring of the telephone, a scream
of someone beaten up far down in the street
causing each of us to listen to her own inward scream
knowing the mind of the mugger and the mugged
as any woman must who stands to survive this city,
this century, this life…
each of us having loved the flesh in its clenched or loosened beauty
better than trees or music (yet loving those too
as if they were flesh—and they are—but the flesh
of beings unfathomed as yet in our roughly literal life).
III.
It’s simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,
dress, go out, drink coffee,
enter a life again. It isn’t simple
to wake from sleep into the neighborhood
of one neither strange nor familiar
whom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,
we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves
downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered
over the unsearched…. We did this. Conceived
of each other, conceived each other in a darkness
which I remember as drenched in light.
I want to call this, life.
But I can’t call it life until we start to move
beyond this secret circle of fire
where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall
where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps
like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.
I.
Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon
sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall,
dissected, their bird-wings severed
like trophies. No one lives in this room
without living through some kind of crisis.
No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.
Thinking of lovers, their bind faith, their
experienced crucifixions,
my envy is not simple. I have dreamed of going to bed
as walking into clear water ringed by a snowy wood
white as cold sheets, thinking, I’ll freeze in there.
My bare feet are numbed already by the snow
but the water
is mild, I sink and float
like a warm amphibious animal
that has broken the net, has run
through fields of snow leaving no print;
this water washes off the scent—
You are clear now
of the hunter, the trapper
the wardens of the mind—
yet the warm animal dreams on
of another animal
swimming under the snow-flecked surface of the pool,
and wakes, and sleeps again.
No one sleeps in this room without
the dream of a common language.
II.
It was simple to meet you, simple to take your eyes
into mine, saying: these are eyes I have known
from the first…. It was simple to touch you
against the hacked background, the grain of what we
had been, the choices, years…. It was even simple
to take each other’s lives in our hands, as bodies.
What is not simple: to wake from drowning
from where the ocean beat inside us like an afterbirth
into this common, acute particularity
these two selves who walked half a lifetime untouching—
to wake to something deceptively simple: a glass
sweated with dew, a ring of the telephone, a scream
of someone beaten up far down in the street
causing each of us to listen to her own inward scream
knowing the mind of the mugger and the mugged
as any woman must who stands to survive this city,
this century, this life…
each of us having loved the flesh in its clenched or loosened beauty
better than trees or music (yet loving those too
as if they were flesh—and they are—but the flesh
of beings unfathomed as yet in our roughly literal life).
III.
It’s simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,
dress, go out, drink coffee,
enter a life again. It isn’t simple
to wake from sleep into the neighborhood
of one neither strange nor familiar
whom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,
we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves
downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered
over the unsearched…. We did this. Conceived
of each other, conceived each other in a darkness
which I remember as drenched in light.
I want to call this, life.
But I can’t call it life until we start to move
beyond this secret circle of fire
where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall
where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps
like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.
June 29, 2022
¡PRECIOSO LIBRO!
"Un poema puede empezar con una mentira. Y ser hecho pedazos"
(y muy buena traducción, ¡sigan contratando a la traductora!)
"Un poema puede empezar con una mentira. Y ser hecho pedazos"
(y muy buena traducción, ¡sigan contratando a la traductora!)
January 2, 2018
I read this collection in two sittings, several months apart. The opening salvo was difficult, deftly constructed and potentially militant. The tome was placed aside and my interests went elsewhere.
This morning, with its megamoon and balmy 0F temperatures saw me grasp it again from my kit bag. I am glad I did. These are sinuous verses, targeted to a relationship where the flesh is often generous. I liked the caprice, the intellectual possibility which occurred periodically.
The collection features two poems deliberately attached to historical situations. That was an intriguing development. I can’t place it at the same level of the William Carlos Williams which I have grown to savor. There is little doubt, however, that this will not mark my last effort with Adrienne Rich.
This morning, with its megamoon and balmy 0F temperatures saw me grasp it again from my kit bag. I am glad I did. These are sinuous verses, targeted to a relationship where the flesh is often generous. I liked the caprice, the intellectual possibility which occurred periodically.
The collection features two poems deliberately attached to historical situations. That was an intriguing development. I can’t place it at the same level of the William Carlos Williams which I have grown to savor. There is little doubt, however, that this will not mark my last effort with Adrienne Rich.
September 27, 2016
This may be my favorite of hers so far, and that's really saying something. This was so intimate and visceral. Every time I opened the book I felt wrapped in Adrienne Rich's world in the 1970s. I suppose you could call this confessional poetry, but so much about it is universal.
August 17, 2015
This is my first experience of Rich's poetry and will definitely not be the last. I will read this book many times to savor my favorite poems, try to glean further meaning from lines that held tightly to so much emotion and pieces of life and experience. What amazes me here is what seems to be the co-mingling of the personal and the universal. I realize that all good literature works to create this but Rich simply (or not simply) does it.
She writes of a woman's life, of women's lives, of human lives and how they matter in the ongoing work that is LIFE. And she writes of love of all sorts: traditional married, lesbian and partner, parent and child. She writes of loss. And she writes of our place in the world.
From "Twenty-One Love Poems":
This apartment full of books could crack open
to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes
of monsters, easily. Once open the books, you have to face
the underside of everything you've loved--
the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag
even the best voices have had to mumble through,
the silence burying unwanted children--
women, deviants, witnesses--in desert sand.
Kenneth tells me he's been arranging his books
so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;
yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift
loathing the woman's flesh while praising her mind.
Goethe's dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,
and the ghosts--their hands clasped for centuries--
of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life--this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half world.
(p 27)
And then I say you must read "Natural Resources" and "Transcendental Etude." which I would love to excerpt here but there are simply too many good sections and they probably each should be read as a whole.
I strongly recommend this collection to anyone who is interested in poetry. Give yourself some time with it. Savor the experience.
She writes of a woman's life, of women's lives, of human lives and how they matter in the ongoing work that is LIFE. And she writes of love of all sorts: traditional married, lesbian and partner, parent and child. She writes of loss. And she writes of our place in the world.
From "Twenty-One Love Poems":
This apartment full of books could crack open
to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes
of monsters, easily. Once open the books, you have to face
the underside of everything you've loved--
the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag
even the best voices have had to mumble through,
the silence burying unwanted children--
women, deviants, witnesses--in desert sand.
Kenneth tells me he's been arranging his books
so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;
yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift
loathing the woman's flesh while praising her mind.
Goethe's dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,
and the ghosts--their hands clasped for centuries--
of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life--this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half world.
(p 27)
And then I say you must read "Natural Resources" and "Transcendental Etude." which I would love to excerpt here but there are simply too many good sections and they probably each should be read as a whole.
I strongly recommend this collection to anyone who is interested in poetry. Give yourself some time with it. Savor the experience.
Read
December 31, 2017I can't even rate this one. With some of these poems, it felt like my emotional core was staring into the sun. Most left absolutely no impression. They were either a bolt of lightning, or a shrug. I loved most of the first section, "Power," and the latter half of the third section, "Not Somewhere Else, But Here."
Here is part of "Origins and History of Human Consciousness":
Here is part of "Origins and History of Human Consciousness":
Thinking of lovers, their bind faith, their
experienced crucifixions,
my envy is not simple. I have dreamed of going to bed
as walking into clear water ringed by a snowy wood
white as cold sheets, thinking, I’ll freeze in there.
My bare feet are numbed already by the snow
but the water
is mild, I sink and float
like a warm amphibious animal
that has broken the net, has run
through fields of snow leaving no print;
this water washes off the scent—
You are clear now
of the hunter, the trapper
the wardens of the mind—
yet the warm animal dreams on
of another animal
swimming under the snow-flecked surface of the pool,
and wakes, and sleeps again.
No one sleeps in this room without
the dream of a common language.
April 29, 2024
4.5
was pretty sure this was gonna be a 4-star read bcs there was a bunch of stuff that i just Did Not Get, but then by the end of the last poem i was full on ugly-crying, so i gotta give credit where it's due.
ugh it's so hard and wonderful, being a person!! and Ms Rich got it, she really did!! personally i think the collection gets progressively stronger as it goes along. part one (power) had the most skips, whereas almost all of the "twenty-one love poems" were achingly beautiful, and some of the "not somewhere else, but here" stuff hit so hard it's as if Ms Rich took a look straight into my head and somehow spun gold from my most tangled and frigtened thoughts.
i feel like this is the sort collection that will only resonate more as i mature and grow, so i look forward to going back to it in a few years' (or decades') time.
Anagord, ty for the rec, u a real one ❤️
was pretty sure this was gonna be a 4-star read bcs there was a bunch of stuff that i just Did Not Get, but then by the end of the last poem i was full on ugly-crying, so i gotta give credit where it's due.
ugh it's so hard and wonderful, being a person!! and Ms Rich got it, she really did!! personally i think the collection gets progressively stronger as it goes along. part one (power) had the most skips, whereas almost all of the "twenty-one love poems" were achingly beautiful, and some of the "not somewhere else, but here" stuff hit so hard it's as if Ms Rich took a look straight into my head and somehow spun gold from my most tangled and frigtened thoughts.
i feel like this is the sort collection that will only resonate more as i mature and grow, so i look forward to going back to it in a few years' (or decades') time.
Anagord, ty for the rec, u a real one ❤️
July 28, 2017
"They can rule the world while they can persuade us our pain belongs in some order."
The Dream of a Common Language is the dream for a world without domination. It's a book of a woman who has the introspective ability to express deeply personal things while giving universal themes and feelings a voice.
This was my first encounter with Adrienne Rich and it's the collection that was released shortly after she came out as gay. The poems it includes were written from 1974 to 1977 and while they are divided into three sections (Power, Twenty-One Love Poems and Not Somewhere Else, But Here.) the underlying theme of the woman is predominant in all of them - loving one, being one.
What fascinated me most was how effortlessly Rich moves from writing about the fates of specific (famous) women to stories relating more directly to her own life and how the reader can draw things from both types of poems. I liked how she works out the meaning of power through her writing, how women can draw power from different sources and most importantly how weakness and power can result from the same things.
"I choose
to separate her from my past we have not shared
I choose not to suffer uselessly
to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me
flashing its bleak torch in my eyes"
The opening poem about Marie Curie was one I enjoyed a lot. Curie found both power and death in her scientific work, which is an unsettling idea. It's uncomfortably beautiful and still terrible nonetheless.
"She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power"
Rich's poems are challenging, some of them I (had to) read multiple times, finding new meanings and coherences each time. The words flow, each line builds upon the previous one and together they form some sort of rumination that make you think on an emotional as well as intellectual level. They're never preachy, but sharp and honest.
" I am choosing
not to suffer uselessly and not to use her
I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence."
The idea of making the decision to love, to find rationality and purpose - power - in something controlling and subjective as love... Ah, I can tell I will come back to this collections of poems at some point. And I hope others will, too.
The Dream of a Common Language is the dream for a world without domination. It's a book of a woman who has the introspective ability to express deeply personal things while giving universal themes and feelings a voice.
This was my first encounter with Adrienne Rich and it's the collection that was released shortly after she came out as gay. The poems it includes were written from 1974 to 1977 and while they are divided into three sections (Power, Twenty-One Love Poems and Not Somewhere Else, But Here.) the underlying theme of the woman is predominant in all of them - loving one, being one.
What fascinated me most was how effortlessly Rich moves from writing about the fates of specific (famous) women to stories relating more directly to her own life and how the reader can draw things from both types of poems. I liked how she works out the meaning of power through her writing, how women can draw power from different sources and most importantly how weakness and power can result from the same things.
"I choose
to separate her from my past we have not shared
I choose not to suffer uselessly
to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me
flashing its bleak torch in my eyes"
The opening poem about Marie Curie was one I enjoyed a lot. Curie found both power and death in her scientific work, which is an unsettling idea. It's uncomfortably beautiful and still terrible nonetheless.
"She died a famous woman denying
her wounds
denying
her wounds came from the same source as her power"
Rich's poems are challenging, some of them I (had to) read multiple times, finding new meanings and coherences each time. The words flow, each line builds upon the previous one and together they form some sort of rumination that make you think on an emotional as well as intellectual level. They're never preachy, but sharp and honest.
" I am choosing
not to suffer uselessly and not to use her
I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence."
The idea of making the decision to love, to find rationality and purpose - power - in something controlling and subjective as love... Ah, I can tell I will come back to this collections of poems at some point. And I hope others will, too.
May 14, 2012
When I was 16 I went to a prestigious art camp. One of our instructors, Pit Pinegar, came to camp with a few books to give away. She held this one up, describing it merely as “poetry by a lesbian poet.” Or perhaps she used the word “feminist.” As a young girl whose life revolved around reading zines, listening to punk, and trying to get girls to kiss me, this appealed to me so I raised my hand high and received the book. It is a beat up, stained, first edition.
I had read a few poems from this collection over the years. Their length/numeration often intimidated me, so I stopped. I am so happy I gave this a chance. I am not really sure how to articulate what I felt about this book. This book did what poetry should do. Rich sheds light on her personal life, but also connects it to the political. We see her struggle with anger at patriarchy, but we continuously see her conclude that fighting for her rights, although it may be destroyed, is worthwhile. Thematically, this book was beautiful.
As far as stylistically, I loved Rich’s control of form. She had a talent for it. I especially loved the longer, numerated pieces: she revisits phrases and thoughts perfectly to come to her conclusion. I loved her literary devices, overall. I especially liked the brief glances of irony. My only complaint about this collection would be her line-breaks: there were times where punctuation was needed. But to be honest, I came to love this book. And with any love, you embrace the flaws as much as the positives.
I had read a few poems from this collection over the years. Their length/numeration often intimidated me, so I stopped. I am so happy I gave this a chance. I am not really sure how to articulate what I felt about this book. This book did what poetry should do. Rich sheds light on her personal life, but also connects it to the political. We see her struggle with anger at patriarchy, but we continuously see her conclude that fighting for her rights, although it may be destroyed, is worthwhile. Thematically, this book was beautiful.
As far as stylistically, I loved Rich’s control of form. She had a talent for it. I especially loved the longer, numerated pieces: she revisits phrases and thoughts perfectly to come to her conclusion. I loved her literary devices, overall. I especially liked the brief glances of irony. My only complaint about this collection would be her line-breaks: there were times where punctuation was needed. But to be honest, I came to love this book. And with any love, you embrace the flaws as much as the positives.
May 4, 2020
The Origins and History of Consciousness
III
“It’s simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,
dress, go out, drink coffee,
enter a life again. It isn’t simple
to wake from sleep into the neighborhood
of one neither strange nor familiar
whom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,
we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves
downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered
over the unsearched…. We did this. Conceived
of each other, conceived each other in a darkness
which I remember as drenched in light.
I want to call this, life.
But I can’t call it life until we start to move
beyond this secret circle of fire
where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall
where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps
like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.”
III
“It’s simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,
dress, go out, drink coffee,
enter a life again. It isn’t simple
to wake from sleep into the neighborhood
of one neither strange nor familiar
whom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,
we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves
downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered
over the unsearched…. We did this. Conceived
of each other, conceived each other in a darkness
which I remember as drenched in light.
I want to call this, life.
But I can’t call it life until we start to move
beyond this secret circle of fire
where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall
where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps
like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.”
July 2, 2021
Primera vez leyendo a Adrienne Rich y ayyy, qué descubrimiento! La intensidad, la belleza, lo combativa, la melancolía, uffff. El dolor y profundo amor de lo que significa ser mujer y amar a mujeres en este mundo. Este libro está lleno de luchas, de indignarse por el hambre y por la violencia, pero también de cotidianos, de despertares con la persona amada, de recorrer el cuerpo de una otra. El poema "Paula Becker a Clara Westhoff" me destruyó, es la definición perfecta de algo precioso y desgarrador:
"Ojalá hubiéramos podido hacer esto, la una por la otra, toda nuestra vida, pero no podemos..."
"Ojalá hubiéramos podido hacer esto, la una por la otra, toda nuestra vida, pero no podemos..."
December 17, 2017
Hunger
-for Audre Lorde
1.
A fogged hill-scene on an enormous continent,
intimacy rigged with terrors,
a sequence of blurs the Chinese painter's ink-stick planned,
a scene of desolation comforted
by two human figures recklessly exposed,
leaning together in a sticklike boat
in the foreground. Maybe we look like this,
I don't know. I'm wondering
whether we even have what we think we have--
lighted windows signifying shelter,
a film of domesticity
over fragile roofs. I know I'm partly somewhere else--
huts strung across a drought-stretched land
not mine, dried breasts, mine and not mine, a mother
watching my children shrink with hunger.
I live in my Western skin,
my Western vision, torn
and flung to what I can't control or even fathom.
Quantify suffering, you could rule the world.
2.
They *can* rule the world while they can persuade us
our pain belongs in some order.
Is death by famine worse than death by suicide,
than a life of famine and suicide, if a black lesbian dies,
if a white prostitute dies, if a woman genius
starves herself to feed others,
self-hatred battening on her body?
Something that kills us or leaves us half-alive
is raging under the name of an "act of god"
in Chad, in Niger, in teh Upper Volta--
yes, that male god that acts on us and on our children,
that male State that acts on us and on our children
till our brains are blunted by malnutritiou,
yet sharpened by the passion for survival,
our powers expended daily on the struggle
to hand a kind of life on to our children,
to change reality for our lovers
even in a single trembling drop of water.
3.
We can look at each other through both our lifetimes
like those two figures in the sticklike boat
flung together in the Chinese ink-scene;
even our intimacies are rigged with terror.
Quantify suffering? My guilt at least is open,
I stand convicted by all my convictions--
you, too. We shrink from touching
our power, we shrink away, we starve ourselves
and each otehr, we're scared shitless
of what it could be to take and use our love,
hose it on a city, on a world,
to wield and guide its spray, destroying
poisons, parasites, rats, viruses--
like the terrible mothers we long and dread to be.
4.
The decision to feed the world
is the real decision. No revolution
has chosen it. For that choice requires
that women shall be free.
I choke on the taste of bread in North America
but the taste of hunger in North America
is poisoning me. Yes, I'm alive to write these words,
to leaf through Kollwitz's women
huddling the stricken children into their stricken arms
the "mothers" drained of milk, the "survivors" driven
to self-abortion, self-starvation, to a vision
bitter, concrete, and wordless.
I'm alive to want more than life,
want it for others starving and unborn,
to name the deprivations boring
into my will, my affections, into the brains
of daughters, sisters, lovers caught in the crossfire
of terrorists of the mind.
In the black mirror of the subway window
hangs my own face, hollow with anger and desire.
Swathed in exhaustion, on the trampled newsprint,
a woman shields a dead child from the camera.
The passion to be inscribes her body.
Until we find each other, we are alone.
-for Audre Lorde
1.
A fogged hill-scene on an enormous continent,
intimacy rigged with terrors,
a sequence of blurs the Chinese painter's ink-stick planned,
a scene of desolation comforted
by two human figures recklessly exposed,
leaning together in a sticklike boat
in the foreground. Maybe we look like this,
I don't know. I'm wondering
whether we even have what we think we have--
lighted windows signifying shelter,
a film of domesticity
over fragile roofs. I know I'm partly somewhere else--
huts strung across a drought-stretched land
not mine, dried breasts, mine and not mine, a mother
watching my children shrink with hunger.
I live in my Western skin,
my Western vision, torn
and flung to what I can't control or even fathom.
Quantify suffering, you could rule the world.
2.
They *can* rule the world while they can persuade us
our pain belongs in some order.
Is death by famine worse than death by suicide,
than a life of famine and suicide, if a black lesbian dies,
if a white prostitute dies, if a woman genius
starves herself to feed others,
self-hatred battening on her body?
Something that kills us or leaves us half-alive
is raging under the name of an "act of god"
in Chad, in Niger, in teh Upper Volta--
yes, that male god that acts on us and on our children,
that male State that acts on us and on our children
till our brains are blunted by malnutritiou,
yet sharpened by the passion for survival,
our powers expended daily on the struggle
to hand a kind of life on to our children,
to change reality for our lovers
even in a single trembling drop of water.
3.
We can look at each other through both our lifetimes
like those two figures in the sticklike boat
flung together in the Chinese ink-scene;
even our intimacies are rigged with terror.
Quantify suffering? My guilt at least is open,
I stand convicted by all my convictions--
you, too. We shrink from touching
our power, we shrink away, we starve ourselves
and each otehr, we're scared shitless
of what it could be to take and use our love,
hose it on a city, on a world,
to wield and guide its spray, destroying
poisons, parasites, rats, viruses--
like the terrible mothers we long and dread to be.
4.
The decision to feed the world
is the real decision. No revolution
has chosen it. For that choice requires
that women shall be free.
I choke on the taste of bread in North America
but the taste of hunger in North America
is poisoning me. Yes, I'm alive to write these words,
to leaf through Kollwitz's women
huddling the stricken children into their stricken arms
the "mothers" drained of milk, the "survivors" driven
to self-abortion, self-starvation, to a vision
bitter, concrete, and wordless.
I'm alive to want more than life,
want it for others starving and unborn,
to name the deprivations boring
into my will, my affections, into the brains
of daughters, sisters, lovers caught in the crossfire
of terrorists of the mind.
In the black mirror of the subway window
hangs my own face, hollow with anger and desire.
Swathed in exhaustion, on the trampled newsprint,
a woman shields a dead child from the camera.
The passion to be inscribes her body.
Until we find each other, we are alone.
July 10, 2012
My dear friend gave me this book after finishing Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, by Cheryl Strayed.
This book by Adrienne Rich apparently was the ONE Cheryl cherished the most and refused to give up.
The epigraph at the beginning by H.D. sets the tone:
I go where I love and where I am loved
into the snow:
I go to the things I love
with no thought of duty or pity.
3 sections: Power; Love poems; Not Somewhere Else But Here.
I enjoy her lyrical reflections and language. Take for instance the beginning of the third stanza of "Transcendental Etude" . The first sentence, wrapping down 10 lines reads this way:
"No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practising till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
Good thoughts, well put, reflective of some of the struggles of being a woman in 1974-77, perhaps still.
This book by Adrienne Rich apparently was the ONE Cheryl cherished the most and refused to give up.
The epigraph at the beginning by H.D. sets the tone:
I go where I love and where I am loved
into the snow:
I go to the things I love
with no thought of duty or pity.
3 sections: Power; Love poems; Not Somewhere Else But Here.
I enjoy her lyrical reflections and language. Take for instance the beginning of the third stanza of "Transcendental Etude" . The first sentence, wrapping down 10 lines reads this way:
"No one ever told us we had to study our lives,
make of our lives a study, as if learning natural history
or music, that we should begin
with the simple exercises first
and slowly go on trying
the hard ones, practising till strength
and accuracy became one with the daring
to leap into transcendence, take the chance
of breaking down in the wild arpeggio
or faulting the full sentence of the fugue.
Good thoughts, well put, reflective of some of the struggles of being a woman in 1974-77, perhaps still.
August 3, 2017
I recently took this with me on a backpacking trip and read through it twice. The poems are accessible without losing their edge. Vulnerable, cutting, powerful. I always feel pretentious writing reviews but these poems are just so damn good.
October 30, 2019
De lo mejor que voy a leer en poesía, increíble.
January 8, 2022
"What kind of beast would turn its life into words?
What atonement is this all about?
—and yet, writing words like these, I'm also living."
What atonement is this all about?
—and yet, writing words like these, I'm also living."
May 22, 2024
favorites: natural resources, transcendental etude, and all of the 21 love poems. just perfect. maddy i will finally give this back to you now!
December 16, 2015
I'm not a regular consumer of poetry, though I wish I were. I rarely take the time to sit and absorb a single poem the way many deserve to be considered. This collection is not the kind to read through in one sitting - it has as many 'wow, I can't believe she just said that so perfectly/shockingly/gently/perversely etc' moments as there are 'what on earth is she talking about right now?' moments. But even the later mostly deliver powerful impressions and 'aha' moments that stick with the reader long after the final phrase.
I'm in awe of her turns of phrase, though I dislike the frequent pauses. She speaks for the voiceless in many of these poems; the oppressed, the departed, the silenced. And she speaks for everyone when talking about love and loss.
A couple examples of favorite lines (that are lovely but the whole poems from these samples are perfection):
I'm in awe of her turns of phrase, though I dislike the frequent pauses. She speaks for the voiceless in many of these poems; the oppressed, the departed, the silenced. And she speaks for everyone when talking about love and loss.
A couple examples of favorite lines (that are lovely but the whole poems from these samples are perfection):
We will not live to settle for less
I am not with her I have been waking off and onThe poem that thunderstruck me was in the Love Poems section, number V. It's an amazing piece about how each of our bookshelves of the 'greats' is hiding the absence of the greats that never got a chance to speak or be heard -- women, minorities, voices of defiance, the prophets, the poor -- either because they died or lived oppressed never able to speak, or due to silencing. This was such an important poem for me because at one point in my life I had a significant other who pointed to the lack of female philosophers and mathematicians on the shelves as proof that women didn't have a lot to contribute to new thought and discovery. He was just an example of a multitude of voices surrounding me with similar, and both loudly or subtly expressed opinions. And those opinions worm their way into society broadly, and my own self-image locally. It takes a lot of energy to call BS on something so widespread and insidious (and to have to repeatedly do so). So I embraced this whip-smart, poignant poem as a call-to-arms to remember the voiceless.
all night to that pain not simply absence but
the presence of the past destructive
to living here and now
This apartment full of books could crack open
to the thick jaws, the bulging eyes
of monsters, easily: Once open the books, you have to face
the underside of everything you’ve loved –
the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gag
even the best voices have had to mumble through,
the silence burying unwanted children-
women, deviants, witnesses – in desert sand.
Kenneth tells me he’s been arranging his books
so he can look at Blake and Kafka while he types;
yes; and we still have to reckon with Swift
loathing the woman’s flesh while praising her mind,
Goethe’s dread of the Mothers, Claudel vilifying Gide,
and the ghosts – their hands clasped for centuries--
of artists dying in childbirth, wise-women charred at the stake,
centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into the absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life—this stlll unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.
August 20, 2007
the poem, "floating, unnumbered" showed me just how a poem can be read and appreciated for its beauty in words, but once fully experienced in ones own life, only then does the poem enter your body
September 15, 2024
intercambio de poemarios el 7 de agosto. hasta el 22 de agosto no vi la hoja arrancada con el poema de amor XVIII que decía no one's fated or doomed to love anyone / the accidents happen / [...] / this we were, this is how we tried to love en tu letra, la letra que voy buscando en cada libro, en cada 20'00 en la esquina superior derecha. entre una fecha y otra se abrió la oportunidad del amor y la cogimos al vuelo, ahora toca seguir esperando aferradas a poemas de la otra, a los versos que a ti te gustan (subrayados) y a los míos (entre corchetes).
we are moving effortlessly in our love / [...] / we will not live / to settle for less We have dreamed of this / all of our lives
seguiremos construyendo una lengua común en la que comunicarnos, aunque [nuestro] pasado [...] / está cargado de distintas lenguas, distintos significados... / aún así, en cualquier crónica del mundo que compartamos / podría escribirse con nuevo significado.
te quiero.
we are moving effortlessly in our love / [...] / we will not live / to settle for less We have dreamed of this / all of our lives
seguiremos construyendo una lengua común en la que comunicarnos, aunque [nuestro] pasado [...] / está cargado de distintas lenguas, distintos significados... / aún así, en cualquier crónica del mundo que compartamos / podría escribirse con nuevo significado.
te quiero.
December 27, 2017
I enjoyed the first and last section best. The love poems in section 2 were a bit similar in size, style, and sentiment, but she can wax the poetic, all right. I picked this up because I read it has become a "classic" of poetry writing. So soon, too! It's not yet 50 years old! Lots of feminist themes, if that's your cuppa.
October 23, 2022
(4,5) Tengo debilidad por las ediciones bilingües y esta edición lo es.
No sé si me gusta tanto la traducción de todos los poemas (siento que me perseguirá para siempre la diferencia entre las traducciones de Bisturí 10 y Lumen en La Belleza del Marido), pero qué potente la poesía de Adrienne Rich. Qué precioso cuando un libro de poemas puede abarcar tanto lo político como lo cotidiano, escribir sobre mujeres, sobre el amor, sobre el deseo, sobre el silencio, sobre el dolor.
Simplemente me siento muy agradecida de las mujeres usando el lenguaje ❤️🔥 Revolucionando con su mera existencia ❤️🔥
“Si pudiera hacerte saber:
dos mujeres juntas es una tarea
que nada en la civilización ha hecho sencilla,
dos personas juntas es una tarea
heroica en su cotidianidad”
“El nacimiento nos despojó de nuestros derechos,
nos arrancó de una mujer, de las mujeres, de nosotras mismas”
“Estas cosas conservadas por mujeres
son todo lo que tenemos de ellas
(…)
y sin ellas no hay memoria
ni lealtad, ni metas de futuro,
ni respeto por el pasado.”
“El silencio puede ser un plan
rigurosamente ejecutado
(…)
No lo confundas
con ningún tipo de ausencia.”
“¿Cómo existo?
Éste era el silencio que yo quería romper en ti.
Yo tenía preguntas pero tú no contestabas.
Yo tenía respuestas pero a ti no te servían.
Esto es inútil para ti y quizás para otros.
Era un tema viejo hasta para mí:
El lenguaje no lo puede todo.”
“Creo que estoy eligiendo algo nuevo
no sufrir inútilmente aun sintiendo”
No sé si me gusta tanto la traducción de todos los poemas (siento que me perseguirá para siempre la diferencia entre las traducciones de Bisturí 10 y Lumen en La Belleza del Marido), pero qué potente la poesía de Adrienne Rich. Qué precioso cuando un libro de poemas puede abarcar tanto lo político como lo cotidiano, escribir sobre mujeres, sobre el amor, sobre el deseo, sobre el silencio, sobre el dolor.
Simplemente me siento muy agradecida de las mujeres usando el lenguaje ❤️🔥 Revolucionando con su mera existencia ❤️🔥
“Si pudiera hacerte saber:
dos mujeres juntas es una tarea
que nada en la civilización ha hecho sencilla,
dos personas juntas es una tarea
heroica en su cotidianidad”
“El nacimiento nos despojó de nuestros derechos,
nos arrancó de una mujer, de las mujeres, de nosotras mismas”
“Estas cosas conservadas por mujeres
son todo lo que tenemos de ellas
(…)
y sin ellas no hay memoria
ni lealtad, ni metas de futuro,
ni respeto por el pasado.”
“El silencio puede ser un plan
rigurosamente ejecutado
(…)
No lo confundas
con ningún tipo de ausencia.”
“¿Cómo existo?
Éste era el silencio que yo quería romper en ti.
Yo tenía preguntas pero tú no contestabas.
Yo tenía respuestas pero a ti no te servían.
Esto es inútil para ti y quizás para otros.
Era un tema viejo hasta para mí:
El lenguaje no lo puede todo.”
“Creo que estoy eligiendo algo nuevo
no sufrir inútilmente aun sintiendo”
Read
June 6, 2016The writing was ponderous, open, lyrical and yet honest and blunt. There were some poems where sexuality and violence, and particularly inherited violence, are so brutally discussed that it breaks your heart, and others where I was left scratching my head wondering what the heck I’d actually just read. I had two problems with this book, neither of which are the authors fault- 1) I am not a lover of free verse poetry. Its just not my thing, even when its good, I have trouble enjoying it. This is probably tied to my inability to hear the beat in music or keep a rhythm, much less spoken word. Ah well. And 2) finding the rhythm and the beat is A LOT harder to do when the Kindle version of the book keeps condensing lines and changing breaks. That interferes with the authors intention, and also makes for bloody hard reading when its poetry. Due to that, I won’t be rating this book as I don’t think I could give it a fair shake when it had been so tampered with by poor software editing/copying.
And yes, I read this entirely because it was mentioned in Cheryl Strayed’s Lost. I’m glad I did. It was quite good, and definitely contains some very important verses that should not be lost to time.
And yes, I read this entirely because it was mentioned in Cheryl Strayed’s Lost. I’m glad I did. It was quite good, and definitely contains some very important verses that should not be lost to time.
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