My Thoughts on Audre Lorde's "Poetry is Not a Luxury"

             Black feminist thought is a class that I am glad that I took. The class has helped me to grow both intellectually and mentally. In the begining I did not have a clear definition of what a feminist is but soon after I declared myself as a activist feminist. In doing such I have dedicated much of my poems to the plight of the black woman in america. One such Black Feminist that has inspired my idea of poetry is Audre Lorde and her essay "Poetry is Not a Luxury". 

          In the piece Lorde mentions that Poetry is illumination, it is through poetry we are able to give ideas a name "feeling births idea, knowledge births understanding". Many of my poems start out as strong feelings about certain life situations. Those feelings create ideas which help to formulate my poems. Lorde then states that Poetry helps us to bear the scrutiny we face by making it a powerless attack against us.As women each of us have a deep place that is a reserve of creativity of power of un-examined and unrecorded emotion and feeling. "The women's place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient and it is deep." 

So then Poetry helps us to bear the scrutiny we face by making it a powerless attack against us. The power women posses, we use to cope in america and create powerful pieces of creative genesis like poetry. "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." For me poetry is not simply something I do for fun, I am compelled to put my feelings down in pen otherwise I would go completely insane in a world that continues to push black women down. 

Quotes that stood out to me

"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."
"In the forefront of our move toward change, there is only our poetry to hint at possibility made real. Our poems formulate the implications of ourselves, what we feel within and dare make real (or bring action into accordance with), our fears, our hopes, our most cherished terrors."
"For there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt, of examining what our ideas really mean (feel like) on Sunday morning at 7 AM, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth; while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while tasting our new possibilities and strengths."

Poetry is the way in which women are able to deal with the world and create it anew. Life as a black woman in a patriarchal society demands we have some sort of coping mechanism and like Audre Lorde, mine is poetry.