As one of her most famous pieces, I was surprised to see that it’s only four pages long. Thinking back, on my younger self, I wonder how much attention I paid to this piece on first encountering this collection.
When poetry was simply another unit in English class, I didn’t think much about being an attentive poetry reader.” If you paid attention, copied your notes accurately from the chalkboard or projector, you could memorize the themes and the relevant literary terms and their definitions. You needn’t develop a skill, you only needed to get by.
As an independent reader, though, school days behind me, I was a novel-reader above all else. Not a short story reader at that time, yet, either. It’s possible that I looked at this essay and thought “not for me.” Neither the poetry, nor the luxury. It’s possible that, in this way, I overlooked the relevance of Audre Lorde’s ideas and beliefs about difference in this context, that I thought her audience for this piece was somebody else very different from me.
In Joan Wylie Hall’s edited volume Conversations with Audre Lorde, ironically, I learned from her 1979 interview with Adrienne Rich, that this essay was the first piece of prose that Audre Lorde had written in years:
“For some reason, the more poetry I wrote, the less I felt I could write prose. Someone would ask for a book review, or, when I worked at the library, for a précis about books—it wasn’t that I didn’t have the skills. I knew about sentences by that time. I knew how to construct a paragraph. But communicating deep feeling in linear, solid blocks of print felt arcane, a method beyond me.”
In 1986, in “The Creative Use of Difference,” Marion Kraft asks her if poetry is “the most important of all these various aspects of her life” and Lorde replies that it’s not the most important but the “strongest expression I have of certain ways of making, identifying, and using my own power.”
She describes poetry as “the skeleton architecture of our lives” which feels like a lot to absorb. But, as she explains, it becomes clear: “because it helps to form the dreams for a future that has not yet been, and toward which we must work, when we speak of change.”
Four years later, in an interview with Charles H. Rowell, she says that this essay and “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger” are the two core pieces of her writing: both approach “difficult questions we have got to raise among ourselves.” She speaks of the need to “make necessary power out of necessary surroundings.”
Regarding her writing process with these pieces: “To write each of those essays I went down really deep, and I started with core questions.” It was a challenge: “I had never written prose like that before. I’m not basically a prose writer; I’m a poet.” But she did not turn away: “So I’ve had to teach myself how to write prose, how to think in solid, linear paragraphs. And it has not been an easy task.”
This essay, concise and precise, feels so authoritative that it’s hard to reconcile with the idea that its author was writing towards understanding rather than expressing an understanding.
“I learned an enormous amount in the writing. They felt like black holes—these small, but incredibly condensed pieces of matter. The ideas and the feelings and questions that are raised in each one of them proliferate through everything I have ever written. They serve as a take-off point for later work; my own, and, I hope, other people’s.”
It’s a challenge to extract a sentence or two, even a short passage, from an essay this concise. When I select one sentence, the next one seems just as important, and the following sentence seems to hold a power accrued from the previous sentences. Isolating any part of it seems to do the essay a disservice.
So, instead, I’ll share some of the other reading I did alongside this essay. Pieces that also seemed to reverberate with Audre Lorde’s prose. As if eavesdropping on a conversation.
The struggles in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body (2021), his closeted identity and challenges faced with coming-out rang in my ears with this passage in Audre Lorde’s essay: “As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.”
In much of Jericho Brown’s The Tradition (2019) this passage of Audre Lorde’s, from this essay, echoed: “These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through the darkness.” For instance, in the final lines of his poem “Hero:” “Gratitude is black – Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death. Thank God. It can’t get much darker than that.”
Next time, thoughts on a piece just one page longer than this one: “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” Even if you’re not familiar, I bet you’ll recognise a line or two.
I loved Billy Belcourt’s book. I’m still a newbie at poetry, although I must admit I may have used the word luxury before when it comes to poetry. I’m not sure why exactly – perhaps it’s because I don’t have the same feeling of accomplishment when I get through a poetry collection v/s a short story or novel. It’s a mystery!
I suppose another point that the title raises, in the context of your comment, too, is that the idea of luxury is always relative. Sometimes I find it exciting, thinking about how little I understand about poetry; other times I find it overwhelming. Depends on the moment!
Loved reading your thoughts on this! Also, Jericho Brown’s The Tradition is an amazing book too!
It’s really good, yes! I immediately started to ration after reading just the first three poems. I recommend Reginald Betts if you enjoy/appreciate Jericho Brown: Felon. And if you can catch an interview that will add to your enjoyment/appreciation too.
You make an interesting point in your intro, about how we negotiate the units we do at university. Looking back on it, I was captivated and enthralled by nearly all of what I did in English Lit, but I came close to sharing your experience with some of the poetry. Not all of it, to be sure. I was entranced by early English poetry like Spenser’s Faerie Queen and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and I was intellectually stimulated by moderns like TS Eliot. But studying Wordsworth et al in between those two was as you have described it, Now I am wondering why that was, and I’m annoyed with myself that I must have been so disengaged that I now can’t even remember which poems we did.
I don’t think I had any confidence with any of those classic poems you appreciated. One of the first poems I remember being affected by was Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”, and a new, young teacher introduced us to a number of Canadian poets (including Margaret Atwood) whose work wasn’t traditionally taught in the classroom, which drew my interest as well. But, overall, I believed it was something that I should immediately and wholly understand…and I did not; it never occurred to me that I might need to practice at it, that it might not be a matter of instant comprehension (as we begin with short novels and do not begin with War and Peace!). I have a copy of one of the texts we used, which helps me recall what we studied, but I am missing the text from earlier school years, which might bring back some of those reading experiences. Maybe you could find a copy of your text/s through a library (a teachers’ college library might have older texts on their shelves too)?
I do have them, school and university ones, but the university text was what we called The Norton, and it is about 1100 pages long. I’d need to go on a strength-training course just to lift it down off the top shelf.
No seriously, it’s more a matter of not really caring. If I can’t remember which ones, so be it. Once I start retracing my steps over all the literature I didn’t make the most of, there will be no end to it.
I suppose the real reason I was (briefly) annoyed with myself was that I had an idea in my mind that I had made very good use of my years at university and I look back fondly on them and myself at that time. And now I realise that I was not entirely the diligent and purposeful student that I thought I was.
The Nortons: I loved them! They felt so authoritative, so complete! Heheh (But, of course, they issued the Women’s Norton later, and various others as well, so that idea of a complete canon was an illusion.) I hadn’t thought of their having been used as texts in Australia too, so that’s good to know. And maybe the best we can hope for is that we were more diligent and purposeful than we might have been. Heheh (Not much consolation, but I’m sure we could have tried less consistently??)
Very interesting, thank you!
I was about to say that she would make for a good reading project, but, well, I guess that’s obvious. Heheh
Fascinating post, and the nudge I need to pull Lorde back off the tbr maybe… ;D
There are several short essays. Perhaps you can just think about reading select pieces rather than the whole book. The next one in sequence would be a good one, about silence. A classic and four pages, I believe. Simple, but powerful.