A. Lorde

"How do you deal with things you believe, live them not as theory, not even as emotion, but right on the line of action and effect and change?

 I had no sense, no understanding at the time, of the connections, just that I was a woman. And that to put myself on the line to do what had to be done at any place and time was so difficult, yet absolutely crucial, and not to do so was the most awful death. And putting yourself on the line is like killing a piece of yourself, in the sense that you have to kill, end, destroy, something familiar and dependable, so that something new can come, in ourselves, in our world. 

And that sense of writing at the edge, out of urgency, not because you choose it but because you have to, that sense of survival- that's what the poem is out of, as well as the pain of my spiritual son's death over and over. 

And once you live any piece of your vision it opens to you a constant onslaught. Of necessities, of horrors, but of wonders too, of possibilities... like meteor showers all the time, bombardment, constant connections. And then, trying to separate what is useful for survival and what is distorted, destructive to the Self.

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I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience...

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 idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.

As they become known to and accepted by us, our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas. They become a safe-house for that difference so necessary to change and the conceptualization of any meaningful action. 

This is not idle fantasy, but a disciplined attention to the true meaning of "it feels right to me". We can train ourselves to respect our feelings and to transpose them into a language so they can be shared. And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only a dream and a vision, it is the skeleton architecture of out lives. 

 For there are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact in the same place that we have hidden our power. They surface in our dreams, and it is our dreams that point our way to freedom. Those dreams are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to think. 

And there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt- of examining what those ideas feel like being lived on Sunday morning at 7am, after brunch, during wild love, making war, giving birth, mourning our dead- while we suffer the old longings, battle the old warnings and fears of being silent and impotent and alone, while we taste new possibilities and strengths."