“The moment of change is the only poem.”

— Adrienne Rich

Last update Nov. 2, 2021. History

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Adrienne Rich51

American poet, essayist and feminist 1929–2012

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“I revise short poems sometimes for years, whereas, since there is no getting lost in the long poem, I engage whatever comes up in the moment and link it with its moment.”

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Context: In the long poem, if there is a single governing image at the center, then anything can fit around it, meanwhile allowing for a lot of fragmentation and discontinuity on the periphery. Short poems, for me, are coherences, single instances on the periphery of a nonspecified center. I revise short poems sometimes for years, whereas, since there is no getting lost in the long poem, I engage whatever comes up in the moment and link it with its moment.

“It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken an immortal wound—that he will never get over it.”

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General sources
Source: "The Poetry of Amy Lowell" in The Christian Science Monitor (16 May 1925)

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Context: p>The poem refreshes life so that we share,
For a moment, the first idea... It satisfies
Belief in an immaculate beginningAnd sends us, winged by an unconscious will,
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“This poem is not addressed to you.
You may come into it briefly,
But no one will find you here, no one.
You will have changed before the poem will.”

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Poem
Departures (1973)