Sunday Gratitude
For the work and spirit of Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde (1934-1992) called herself a, “Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet,” and came into my life as one of the many writer/scholar/activists I studied when I was a Women’s Studies major as an undergraduate. Many of her writings influence the way I think, but this very well known essay, “Poetry is not a luxury,” has been a life long inspiration.
In it she makes the case that revolution, evolution, progress—whatever you want to call the process of creating a more inclusive, sane, fair, humane world—has its genesis in the human body and in the imagination. This idea is why memoir is my heart-and-soul genre. In memoir great writers share their embodied experience inside the rigor and structure of language. A memoir writer’s work is to render their own deeply felt, fundamentally subjective experience on the page in such a way that it changes her reader. At it’s best, a memoir gives us a new idea about ourselves and our place in the family of all things.
Lorde’s essay makes the case for why this difficult work is worth doing.
“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.”
Listen to Poetry is Not a Luxury
The Marginalian on the work of Audre Lorde
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See you tomorrow! XO
Thank you for sharing the essay by Audre Lorde — “distillation of experience, not word play” (or something like that). Honestly, sometimes in the “poetry” world I flounder through works that do not provide grounding: specific details about time, person, place, etc. instead the language is intimidating and abstract. At all levels of education, we carry an ability to react to the light around us, to make art. As diminished in the real world as the pursuit can be, it’s as necessary as breathing, not a luxury.
You keep on keeping on gurl, can’t wait til your book is out.