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"Poetry is not a Luxury"

© Dorothy Harris

One of the roles that women writers and artists have taken on from the earliest recorded works by women artists is to assert their own rights to opportunities as women, thereby opening doors for other women in the same arena. There are times when these artists use their work as a forum to instruct other women on lessons they've learned as artists in a male dominated society.

Audre Lorde is one such artist. As a writer, activist, educator, and lecturer, Lorde included many lessons on the significance of writing, language and voice to women. In her discussions, essays, lectures, and poetry, she speaks to several issues women face, especially with regards to silencing our voices in a society which intentionally minimizes who we are. According to Lorde, speaking out about who we are and about our experiences in this environment is the key, not only to our empowerment, but to our survival. For Lorde, then, women's artistic work is not limited to the aesthetic (which should in no way be ignored). But women's artistic work is an avenue to accessing our power, a means to explore our dreams, an opportunity to make visible our fears.

Lorde writes an essay entitled, "Poetry is not a Luxury," in which she discusses the role of poetry to giving women voice, to giving language and structure to our experiences, to giving a format to the expression of our dreams.

Her opening paragraphs of this essay read:

The Quality of Light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through peotry that we give name to those ideas which are - until the poem - nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dreams births concepts, as feeling births idea, as knowldege births (precedes) understanding.

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.

For Lorde, poetry is a woman's tool for empowerment. Women who are poets are able, through the process of constructing poetry, to be in touch with a hidden voice and with hidden power against those things, those forces that tend, intentionally or unintentionally, to disempower us.

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