To the Lighthouse: Poetry Is Not a Luxury

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.

-- American poet Audre Lorde (1934-92), "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," 1977

My Dear Poet Friends and Reader:

I didn't sleep well last Saturday, and I got up early yesterday morning and read my emails. My friend, Mary, emailed me a pdf copy of "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" written by Audre Lorde, one of my favorite poets. 

After reading this succinct, heartfelt and provoking essay (a free, full-text version posted here), my spirit was immediately lifted up.

I would like share with you my emailed response to Audre Lorde's "view of Poetry, Not a Luxury:"

Black womanist view of poetry:

The white fathers told us, I think therefore I am; and the black mother in each of us-the poet- whispers in our dreams, I feel therefore I can be free.

And

I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches as keystone for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry.

In Audre Lorde's view, ‘Poetry Not a Luxury"  is both a reflection of experience and a way of experiencing the world. It reveals  how we feel about the world is as important as what the world ‘is’.

Her view of poetry reminds me of the thematic focus of “Invitation” by Mary Oliver

just to "be alive"

on this "fresh" morning [feeling about the world] 

in the broken world [what the world "is"]

And I wrote a tanka set, "Thanksgiving Emails," in response to Mary Oliver's heartfelt and reflective lines:

Subject: thanksgiving alone

To: my self [stuck in life] 

From: me

Date: November 23

at daybreak flickering birdsong

Re.: thanksgiving alone

To: my [drunken] self

From: me

Date: November 24

alive in this broken world

FYI: This is the first set of English language tanka "written in the form of an email."

And I couldn't agree with Audre Lorde's concluding remarks more:

As poets. And there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place where we have hidden our power. They lie in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare.

...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 [at 7:30 in Ajax]

Afterthought: 

The opening quote, "poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence," reminds me of Ishikawa Takuboku's conception of a new kind of poetry, “poems to eat” as articulated in the introduction to Sad Toys:

My mind, which was yearning after some indescribable thing from morning to night, could find an outlet to some extent only by making poems. And I had absolutely nothing except that mind… I want to say this: a very complicated process was needed to turn actual feelings into poetry… Poetry must not be what is usually called poetry. It must be an exact report, an honest diary, of the changes in a man’s emotional life. Accordingly, it must be fragmentary; it must not have organization… Each second is one which never comes back in our life. I hold it dear. I don’t want to let it pass without doing anything for it. To express that moment, tanka, which is short and takes not much time to compose, is most convenient…

And the conclusion of the opening quote, "we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action," reminds me the following remarks on poetry in times of crisis:

In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, "poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty." 

-- Seamus Heaney, an Irish poet, playwright and translator who received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Poetry is insurrection, resurrection, and insubordination -- against amnesia of every sort, against every form of oppression, dispossession and indifference. And against the drowning noise of other words. 

-- Anne Michaels, Infinite Gradation