Course:Audre Lorde’s “Poetry is Not a Luxury” essay in The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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| Important Course Pages |
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When I began writing poetry, I gravitated towards sound poets and exploring the sensory aspects of poetry through traditional subjects like romance. It felt fresh to walk these trodden paths with a queer take. Then I came across this collection of Lorde’s essays, and the 1977 essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury” in particular. Lorde was a poet, scholar, activist, and brilliant essayist who wrote from the perspectives of queer Black womanhood, and she was incisive about the power dynamics at work in white, patriarchal poetry culture. Her work stimulated me to think more deeply about what the content of poetry can do, and I come back to this essay again and again as I challenge myself to live and create in this way. Lorde frames poetry as not merely ornamental, but as essential to freedom; as not merely wordplay, but the chance to embody silenced perspectives in order that they might become action:
Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought… our feelings and the honest explorations of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action.
With this view of poetry as a place of cultivation, I challenge myself to explore scenarios that may be tender, embarrassing, or angry, and to use poetry as a place to dream a bridge to a better collective future. This year, that has led me to write poems that look for ways out of violence and towards caretaking for the trans and queer community. I begin poems with questions, with searching. I look for undernourished emotional truths and the implications these can have towards a more daring future.