Audre Lorde begins her essay “Poetry is Not a Luxury” by stating that:
The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives.
Lorde refers to poetry as the “revolutionary distillation of experience,” viewing poetry as the way in which humans name the nameless.
Just as a dream is to consciousness, so is poetry to language. Safe from the censorship of coherency, images surface from the subconscious, fragmented, yet fluid. It is here that women first began to define themselves. It is here that we will continue to redefine who we are.
Gilbert and Gubar note in their landmark work Madwoman in the Attic:
For all literary artists, of course, self-definition necessarily precedes self-assertion: the creative ‘I AM’ cannot be uttered if the “I” knows not what it is.
The dream speaks of secret knowledge: wisdom the self is not yet ready to acknowledge, not yet capable of comprehending. Poetry serves the same function for language, reducing radical concepts into individual images that can slip past the censor of conventional thought.
It is through this process that poetry shapes and forms new linguistic ideas, ideas that will one day transform conventional thought.
June 25, 2007 at 2:25 pm
That’s exactly why I think poetry still can make a difference to the way we live our lives and how we perceive existence.
June 25, 2007 at 7:59 pm
I loved this: “the creative ‘I AM’ cannot be uttered if the “I” knows not what it is.”