we are, i am, you are.

There’s a line in one of Adrienne Rich’s best and most famous poems, “Diving Into the Wreck,” that I’ve carried around inside myself like a brain tattoo for 20-some years: We are, I am, you are. Rich wrote many lines that meant something important to me over the course of her long career, but that one strikes me as core. In those six lean words, she bound us together — the entire beautiful and ugly mass of us made, by virtue of her words, indivisible. Indivisibility is classic Rich. She was a great connector of things: art to politics, love to rage, consciousness to action, society to self, power to wound, me to you, us to her.

Article about Adrienne Rich by Cheryl Strayed for The New York Times.
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