gastarbajterica

Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes through
our cries, our murmured dawn conspiracies
our telephone calls. She knows—what can she know?
If in my human arrogance I claim to read
her eyes, I find there only my own animal thoughts:
that creatures must find each other for bodily comfort
...
that without tenderness, we are in hell.

from poem X by Adrienne Rich

https://allpoetry.com/poem/10381465-Twenty-One-Love-Poems-X-by-Adrienne-Rich

#poem #poetry #TodaysPoem

Jun 7, 2023 at 3:27pmWeb
Show threadAndrew ShieldsJun 7, 2023

@gastarbajterica “Twenty-One Love Poems” is such an amazing sequence! We discussed the passage with the dog in my seminar on Rich in Spring 2021 (all on Zoom then …).

Here are two posts of mine about other moments in the sequence:

https://andrewjshields.blogspot.com/2021/03/no-one-has-imagined-us-lesbian-couple.html

https://andrewjshields.blogspot.com/2021/03/philoctetes-in-womans-form-andre-gide.html

#Poetry #AdrienneRich #TwentyOneLovePoems #TheDreamOfACommonLanguage #AndreGide #Philoctetes

"No one has imagined us": A lesbian couple and the representation of women in pornography in Adrienne Rich's "Twenty-One Love Poems"

Adrienne Rich's "Twenty-One Love Poems" (1976) depicts two women in a lesbian relationship who feel the absence of the representation of les...