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The great flowering of Yiddish literature took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, along with the rise of Jewish secularism and the Jewish labor and socialist movements.

— Adrienne Rich Introduction to A Few Words in the Mother Tongue: Poems by Irena Klepfisz (1990)

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More quotes by Adrienne Rich

Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.

Experience is always larger than language.

Interview (1991)

I have to say that what I know I know through making poems.

Poetry and Experience (1964)

Of course, like the consciousness behind it, behind any art, a poem can be deep or shallow, glib or visionary, prescient or stuck in an already lagging trendiness.

I believe in the necessity for a poetic language untethered from the compromised language of state and media.

Arts of the Possible (2000)

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