Poetry can't give us the laws and institutions and representatives, the antidotes we need: only public activism by massive numbers of citizens can do that.
Interpretation
Poetry inspires but cannot replace active civic engagement.
This quote by Adrienne Rich emphasizes that while poetry and art have significant value in society, they cannot alone provide the solutions or structures necessary for effective change. Instead, it is the collective action of citizens, through public activism, that delivers genuine remedies to societal issues. Rich suggests that the real antidotes to our problems come from the commitment and involvement of the populace, rather than mere artistic expression.
In practice
In a speech about community service, you could reference this quote to highlight the importance of active participation.
My children cause me the most exquisite suffering of which I have any experience. It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness. Sometimes I seem to myself, in my feelings toward these tiny guiltless beings, a monster of selfishness and intolerance.
The word revolution itself has become not only a dead relic of Leftism, but a key to the deadendedness of male politics: the revolution of a wheel which returns in the end to the same place; the revolving door of a politics which has liberated women only to use them, and only within the limits of male tolerance.
A president cannot meaningfully honor certain token artists while the people at large are so dishonored.'β
There is no 'the truth','a truth' - truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing complexity. the pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely, or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet
It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness
It's as if, in the mother's eyes, her smile, her stroking touch, the child first reads the message:'You are there!'
The fact of the matter is that the most unexpected and miraculous thing in my life was the arrival in it of poetry itself - as a vocation and an elevation almost.
A writer's definitive death is when no one reads his books anymore. That's the final death.
[Photography] puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact.
I love this quote uttered by the character Widget in The Night Circus. He credits it to Herr Thiessen but knows it is a literary quote by the another author. "Wine is bottled poetry
Anybody with artistic ambitions is always trying to reconnect with the way they saw things as a child.
I eagerly await new concepts and processes. I believe that the electronic image will be the next major advance. Such systems will have their own inherent and inescapable structural characteristics, and the artist and functional practitioner will again strive to comprehend and control them.
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