Poetry Is Not a Luxury

Black Girl Reading

Today I share excerpts from poet Audre Lorde’s feminist essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” found in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1985). The essay can also be found on-line in its entirety here.  In Lorde’s vision, poetry reconnects us with deep truths that have been suppressed and forgotten. By giving these truths a voice and a shape, poetry allows us to consolidate and build upon them.

By Audre Lorde, excerpts from “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”

…For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

As they become known and accepted to ourselves, our feelings, and the honest exploration of them, become sanctuaries and fortresses and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas, the house of difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. Right now, I could name at least ten ideas I would have once found intolerable or incomprehensible and frightening, except as they came after dreams and poems. This is not idle fantasy, but the true meaning of “it feels right to me.” We can train ourselves to respect our feelings, and to discipline (transpose) them into a language that matches those feelings so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives…

The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mothers in each of us–the poet–whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free. Poetry coins the language to express and charter this revolutionary awareness and demand, the implementation of that freedom. However, experience has taught us that the action in the now is also always necessary. Our children cannot dream unless they live, they cannot live unless they are nourished, and who else will feed them the real food without which their dreams will be no different from ours?…

For within structures defined by profit, by linear power, by institutional dehumanization, our feelings were not meant to survive. Kept around as unavoidable adjuncts or pleasant pastimes, feelings were meant to kneel to thought as we were meant to kneel to men. But women have survived. As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They lie in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.

If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is a luxury, then we have given up the core–the fountain–of our power, our womanness; we give up the future of our worlds…

 

And here’s a Lorde poem that I’ve always appreciated that makes her point. As I read it, she is pushing against the stereotyped traditional relationship in which a woman wants a man who will protect her. The poem envisions–becomes a sanctuary, fortress, or spawning ground for–another possibility: it takes a strong woman, not a weak one, to be drawn to a strong man. I don’t entirely understand the image of children building sand castles but I see three possibilities. The one that appeals most to me, as a man, is that just as strong women will learn to love strong men, so strong men will learn to love children, even if those children are engaged in fragile enterprises. In other words, just as feminism freed up women to build nations, so feminism freed up men to care for children.

But perhaps the reference to children is an image of nation-building men: strong women can learn to love strong men even when those men are engaged in enterprises that will fail. Strong themselves, they will not fear allying themselves with men who may fail. Or the poem could be saying that strong women and strong men together will learn to love their vulnerable children.

I invite readers to send in their own interpretations.

The Seventh Sense 

by Audre Lorde

Women
who build nations
learn
to love
men
who build nations
learn
to love
children
building sand castles
by the rising sea.

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