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Old 10-25-2019, 12:18 AM   #745
Kätzchen
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Here is a few excerpts from an essay written by Audre Lorde, which was first published in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture (no. 3; 1977) and is featured in Audre Lorde's book Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Feminist Theory).






Poetry Is Not A Luxury *

~ Audre Lorde

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has a 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 poetry 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 dream births concept, as feelings births idea, as knowledge births (preceeds) 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 each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises (…).

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives (pp. 36-37).
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