Audre Lorde famously suggested that “for women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.” Expounding upon the liberatory potential of poetry for its marginalized writers, she says this:
The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within 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 demand, the implementation of that freedom.
Among the many lessons that can be gleaned from Lorde’s essay is the recognition of the inherent freedom that lies in feeling.
I am reminded of this Toni Morrison quote that Prince Bush shared on Twitter a few days ago:
To actively feel, to not withdraw emotionally from the often hostile climate of mainstream society, is a difficult thing to subject oneself to. This becomes increasingly complicated in the poetic sense, wherein “feeling” is a largely contested term, meaning sensibility or emotion or bias or mood or any reconfiguration of these and other concepts.
Poetry, for marginalized people especially, is embodied, interwoven through self and experience. In Tradition and the Individual Talent, while exploring what he believes makes a poet truly unique and talented, T. S. Eliot states the following:
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting... The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones.
Lorde echoes this in saying that “… there are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” Unlike Eliot, whose focus seems almost detrimentally universal, Lorde seems to be pointing toward tradition and shared history when making this statement. While many of us may have similar experiences of tragedy and joy, and are constantly at risk of becoming desensitized to either side of the emotional coin, so to speak, the poet’s job is to frame these subjects anew.
“Once upon a Black imagination” by Natasha Marin opens on a scene of long-awaited racial equity:
The space of Blackness represents safety because this is where everyone can finally belong. The clumsy fantasy of Whiteness has finally been moved off the stage and back into the audience after being muted for taking up too much space.
Black imagination is a specified form of radical imagination which offers an image of a world free from the intertwined systemic oppressions that reign today. Such visions of unquestioned safety and belonging also manifest in poetic work.
Eve L. Ewing’s “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store” exemplifies this concept, recasting the slain young boy as an elderly man whose life was never ended prematurely by racially motivated vitriol. (I analyzed this poem in more detail a few weeks ago here.)
One of my all-time favorite poems, “summer somewhere” by Danez Smith, stretches the imagination beyond life itself.
but here, not earth
not heaven, boys can’t recall their white shirt
turned a ruby gown. here, there is no language
for officer or law, no color to call white.
if snow fell, it’d fall black. please, don’t call
us dead, call us alive someplace better.
That elusive somewhere is a sanctuary made of words, a resting place for the countless individuals taken too soon from this earth.
Some are invoked by name, others are not. All are resurrected:
that boy was Trayvon, now called RainKing.
that man Sean named himself I do, I do.
O, the imagination of a new reborn boy
but most of us settle on alive.
Use of the word “imagination” here fascinates me, as the scene already takes place in an imagined realm. It is a powerful sentiment, for those victims to not only be given new life, but to reattain their own imaginations as well.
This truly demonstrates the radical importance of imagination. Danez Smith imagined this summertime haven populated with our resurrected dead so that we as readers can imagine it as well. Then, these imagined figures are given the capability of further (re-)imagining themselves under new names, and new circumstances.
The whole cycle illustrates yet another quote from Poetry Is Not a Luxury:
[Poetry] forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.
When thinking of this “action” that Audre Lorde suggests, my mind ends up at Hanif Abdurraqib’s series of poems entitled “How Can Black People Write About Flowers at a Time Like This.” To paraphrase the backstory, which you can read in Abdurraqib’s own words here, the poems respond in various ways to the absurdity of the question which titles them.
dear reader, with our heels digging into the good
mud at a swamp’s edge, you might tell me something
about the dandelion & how it is not a flower itself
but a plant made up of several small flowers at its crown
By referencing a “reader” rather than calling out the white woman who was overheard questioning how a Black poet could speak of flowers “at a time like this,” Abdurraqib shifts the focus of the narrative. His intended audience is not one that needs to be corrected or reprimanded.
In fact, it doesn’t matter who exactly the reader is. It only matters that, according to the poem’s narrative, they stand alongside the speaker, introducing a little anecdote about dandelions regardless of the situation at hand.
The final lines of the poem are brilliant, putting the imagination to good use.
say: that boy he look like a hollowed-out grandfather
clock. he look like a million-dollar god with a two-cent
heaven. like all it takes is one kiss & before morning,
you could scatter his whole mind across a field.
Coupling the familiar language of light-hearted banter (“that boy he look like”) with lush images such as “million-dollar god with a two-cent heaven” grounds the poem in observable reality while stretching its limits to glory and beyond.
This series of poems does not have the luxury of celebrating blackness without an unfortunate catalyst. So, in his clever yet unambiguous criticism of that woman’s ill-informed question, Abdurraqib invokes the radical imagination to gesture toward abundance, vitality, and beauty.
Thanks, as always, for reading. I was actually consistent and sent out a newsletter every week in November, which feels like a great accomplishment. If you engaged at all with any of it, I’m thankful.
Until next time…
<3 Bee