Adrienne Rich Quotes

My novels and poems are meant to be read aloud. That's why jazz musicians have been able to adapt my stuff.

I take my spoken-word stuff extremely seriously because I feel like that's true writing, true lyricism.

Black actors on the road, flying around the country working as poets. Those people are inspirations for millions of kids who write.

I write the books that I'm compelled to and I definitely learn things about the world when I write them, and I hope that other people get something out of them, enjoy them, see the world differently when they're done.

If i write a book it will probably be a book about how not to use the internet or a book of poetry.

What happened to poetry in the twentieth century was that it began to be written for the page.

The first spoken word poem I ever wrote was when I was 14 and I wrote it because I was accidentally signed up for a teen poetry slam. Because I loved poetry I said that I'd try it out.

I really love poetry. I'm a big E.E. Cummings fan and a big Walt Whitman fan, and I have a big book of poetry.

My friend Akshay Upadhyay and I used to write poetry and read out to each other.

I was always into poetry and writing. So the urgency of spoken word is something that really has always appealed to me.

I really just love reading. It's my favorite thing, performing my poems live. Reading by reading, I just kind of follow my nose.

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid... initially and my own stories.

The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.

The poetry I love is written with someone's voice and I believe its proper culmination is to be read with someone's voice. And the human voice in that sense is not electronically reproduced or amplified.

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

I used to write poems more when I was younger, but I haven't in a long time. I just write ideas and paragraphs and go from there.

When Toni Morrison said 'write the book you want to read,' she didn't mean everybody.

Some readers read a book as if it were an instruction manual, expecting to understand everything first time, but of course when you write, you put into every sentence an overflow of meaning, and you create in every sentence as many resonances and double meanings and ambiguities as you can possibly pack in there, so that people can read it again and get something new each time.

My writing just kind of exists out there in the air-it's all sort of intended as spoken, or sung, word. So, to commit them to the page...that way was kind of intimidating to me, yet intriguing, to try to reflect the rhythms and connotations and emotions that you can deliver, speaking-wise, on a page.

[To write poems] I think it's important to do research, and research mostly is going to come from books, so all of your reading is potentially helpful to your poetry.

I think you can perform any poem. But what I believe is that the best examples of spoken word poetry I've ever seen, are spoken word poems that, when you see them, you're aware of the fact they need to be performed. That there's something about that poem that you would not be able to understand if you were just reading it on a piece of paper.

When you recite you're giving a performance, in the way that an actor or a singer performs, and some poets are not interested in doing that, maybe because they're writing for a readership as opposed to an audience, or because they see poetry as a very private art.

I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years without writing poems, and then write a dozen. Having a novel to work on, with the intricate puzzle of character and plot to work out, is satisfying for the time there is no poetry.

Preaching and writing - it's the same. Whether I'm writing to speak or writing to be read in a book, it's the same thing.

I began by doing book reviews on the typewriter and then went over to short stories on the machine, meanwhile sticking to pencil for poetry.