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| omnipoetics:blood_bread_and_poetry [2025/04/23 23:49] – adriana | omnipoetics:blood_bread_and_poetry [2025/04/23 23:49] (current) – [Selected Quotes from Blood, Bread, and Poetry] adriana |
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| ===== Selected Quotes from Blood, Bread, and Poetry ===== | |
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| | ====== Blood, Bread, and Poetry Quotes ====== |
| | The following quotations work to highlight Rich's coming-to-consciousness that occured over the years, eventually leading to her reclamation of power and authority outside of the myths that she was taught as a woman in a white, male dominated culture. Through this, she reclaims her ability and position as a woman poet, more specifically a Jewish woman poet, and later as a lesbian radical feminist. |
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| | "...When the ideas or forms we need are banished, we week their residues wherever we can trace them. But there was one major problem with this. I had been born a woman, and I was trying to think and act as if poetry—and the possibility of making poems-were a universal-a gender-neutral-realm. In the universe of the masculine paradigm, I naturally absorbed ideas about women, sexuality, power from the subjectivity of male poets-Yeats not least among them. **The dissonance between these images and the daily events of my own life demanded a constant footwork of imagination, a kind of perpetual translation, and an unconscious fragmentation of identity: woman from poet. Every group that lives under the naming and image-making power of a dominant culture is at risk from this mental fragmentation and needs an art which can resist it"** (175). |
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| | "The writers I found were Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, and James Baldwin. Each of them helped me to realize that what had seemed simply 'the way things are' could actually be a social construct, advantageous to some people and detrimental to others, and that these constructs could be criticized and changes. **The myths and obsessions of gender, the myths and obsessions of race, the violent exercise of power in these relationships could be identified, their territories could be mapped.They were not simply part of my private turmoil, a secret misery, an individual failure.** I did not yet know what I, a white woman, might have to say about the racial obsessions of white consciousness. **But I did begin to resist the apparent splitting of poet from woman, thinker from woman, and to write what I feared was political poetry...I did find courage and vindication in words like Baldwin's: 'Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity the end of safety,'** (176). |
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| | "There is the **falsely mystical view of art that assumes a kind of supernatural inspiration, a possession by universal forces unrelated to questions of power and privilege or the artist's relation to bread and blood.** In this view, the channel of art can only become clogged and misdirected by the artist's concern with merely temporary and local disturbances. **The song is higher than the struggle, and the artist must choose between politics-here defined as earth-bound factionalism, corrupt power struggles- and art, which exists on some transcendent plane. This view of literature has dominated literary criticism in England and America for nearly a century.** In the fifties and early sixties there was much shaking of heads if an artist was found 'meddling in politics'; art was mystical and universal, but the artist was also, apparently, irresponsible and emotional and politically naive" (178). |
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| | "**To write directly and overtly as a woman, out of a woman's body and experience, to take women's existence as seriously as theme and source for art, was something I had been hungering to do, needing to do, all my writing life. It placed me nakedly face to face with both terror and anger; it did indeed imply the breakdown of the world as I had always known it, the end of safety,** to paraphrase Baldwin again. But it released tremendous energy in me, as in many other women, to have that way of writing affirmed and validated in a growing political community. I felt for the first time the closing of the gap between poet and woman...**As a lesbian-feminist poet and writer, I need to understand how this location affects me, along with the reality of blood and bread within this nation"** (182-183). |
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| | Rich, Adrienne Cecile. Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985. Norton, 1986. |
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