Time & Perspective Quote by Adrienne Rich

“False history gets made all day, any day” is Rich compressing a whole media ecosystem into one grim, clocklike rhythm. The line doesn’t accuse history of being occasionally distorted; it argues fabrication is continuous, industrial, banal. “Gets made” is the tell: history isn’t discovered, it’s manufactured, and the passive voice points to a dispersed machine of institutions, editors, and incentives that can’t be pinned on a single villain. The repetition of “day” drains the drama from deception. This is not a scandal; it’s the weather.

Then Rich pivots to a different scandal: “the truth of the new is never on the news.” The wordplay isn’t cute; it’s an indictment of how “news” pretends to be synonymous with novelty while routinely missing the actual birth of reality. “Truth of the new” suggests emergent social facts before they harden into consensus: what marginalized people are already living, what movements are incubating, what language is changing under pressure. In Rich’s hands, the “new” isn’t trendiness; it’s the frightening, liberating moment when power hasn’t yet decided how to narrate an event.

Context matters because Rich wrote as a poet steeped in feminist and antiwar politics, suspicious of official stories and their tidy timelines. The subtext is a warning about the lag between lived experience and public record: by the time something becomes “news,” it’s already been formatted to fit familiar plots. Poetry, by contrast, is pitched as a rival information system - not neutral, but capable of registering realities before they’re domesticated into “history.”