a few updates: III

Susannah Bartlow
“Poetic Justice: Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Radical Conversation”
Northeast Modern Language Association
Friday, April 11, 2008

This paper is a kind of literary history that explores how Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich use a self-conscious conversational model to establish community around the transformative power of poetry. Lorde’s increased connections with womanist and Afrocentric worldviews, and her subsequent artistic maturation in the early 1980s, parallel Rich’s aesthetic and political feminism leading up to 1973’s Diving Into the Wreck. Both women experienced these political commitments as aesthetic transformations that brought them into a more personally satisfying relationship with their writing and into a conversation they chose to have.

Two central ideas underlie this paper: that Lorde and Rich both pursued a conversational or dialogic approach and that this is the necessary precursor to a liberation defined by the right to be able to choose our accountabilities in a sort of radial grid of conscious affiliation. Lorde and Rich suggest that tension about our words’ responsibility and context is productive, that it sets goals, bonds subjects, clarifies desires, and otherwise engages the radical potential of conversation. They suggest even beyond that that the expression and reception of poetic language creates, in Lorde’s words, “a bridge across our fears of what has never been before,” drawing radical change from the necessary nurturance of the self.

Based on trips to West Africa, as well as a generally growing interest in her racial identity, the substance of Audre Lorde’s work changed significantly in the 1970s. Lorde, who was by the mid-1970s an established poet and committed activist, found a wealth of metaphors and feminist spirituality that led to her artistic maturation. In The Black Unicorn’s “125th Street & Abomey,” Lorde writes Seboulisa, whom Alexis DeVeaux calls “’the mother goddess of all’” (151) onto the streets of Harlem, finding support and a mirroring of her own identity as she pleads to Seboulisa to “give me the woman strength / of tongue in this cold season” (BU 12). The images of New York street scenes guarded by a transatlantic mother goddess provide Lorde’s sought-after ideological and spiritual home inside her geographic and familial home of Harlem. Notably, Seboulisa is invoked in order to give Lorde the power of speech, suggesting that Lorde finds poetic power by naming her chosen community. The result of this addition to her arsenal is a more stable and connected self-consciousness as well as a more rich and empowering poetic practice that bridges transatlantic divides.

This aesthetic turn in Lorde’s career also cemented her status as a feminist icon, since both black arts and feminist communities were emphasizing archaeology of African roots and goddess-centered cultures. Lorde, however, insisted that she be able to adopt whatever multiplicity of allegiances she could—that her blackness was integral to her lesbian identity was essential to her role as a mother which was key to her activism, and so forth. She insisted, in other words, that she was accountable to particular communities, but most of all to an inner sense of herself that she labeled the “erotic”. The erotic is primarily defined as the ability to understand and respect her own feelings and re-construct them in language in order to create an open and transformative relation. In “Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” Lorde writes that “our feelings and the honest exploration of them become sanctuaries and spawning grounds for the most radical and daring of ideas” (37). Lorde’s erotic stimulates security and innovation in herself and in the reader, building inner strength at the same time that it shores up community transformation.

Lorde’s erotic invokes the imagined space that Elizabeth Alexander terms “the black interior”, a phrase that claims the interiority of a black subject as a safe and sacred space of privacy and self-renewal. Alexander’s reading of the black interior illustrates a similar process as Farah Jasmine Griffin’s conceptualization of embodiment through textual healing, Lorde’s erotic, and Rich’s notion of poetic process: each is a cumulative product of a creative responsibility, renewed through daily attentions and social engagement. In the black interior and the notion of textual healing, the unconscious is not being controlled, it is being artfully responded to by a conscious self. The desire to link these two brings Lorde into a more possible way of relating to the social world, and, in connecting, brings her singular body and mind into a continuum of like-minded writers.

In “The Transformation of Silence Into Language and Action,” presented at the MLA conference in December 1977, Lorde writes “… I am myself—a Black woman warrior poet doing my work—come to ask you, are you doing yours?” (41-42). Lorde demands conversation, predicated upon her own hard labor and self-sustenance; she knows who she is and requires her audience to ask themselves difficult questions, engaging in both self-scrutiny and transformative conversation. Like Adrienne Rich, and I’ll discuss this in a moment, Lorde is trying to make something happen in the reader, to construct an intimacy that alters consciousness. This open relation depends upon a distinct subjectivity that works, through a self-conscious knowledge of where the boundaries are in self and other, to establish community.

I want to consider this process as an essential act that presages choosing accountabilities, and here I’ll move on to talk about Adrienne Rich. For Rich, as for Lorde, poetry is a form of sublime and political communication. As she writes in the foreword to The Fact of A Doorframe:

Over the years it has seemed to me just that—the desire to be heard, to
resound in another’s soul—that is the impulse behind writing poems...
Increasingly, this has meant hearing and listening to others, taking into
myself the language of experience different from my own. (xvi)

Rich’s poetry requires not simply an audience or reader but a responsive listener ready to receive the poem at a deep level. Her work calls readers to understand poetry as part of an effort in a social relationship: as a social work.

Now an icon of feminist verse and activism, Rich chose this community by breaking with a successful mainstream literary career that began at Radcliffe College in the late 1940s. In 1951, poet W.H. Auden prefaced the classy deportment of Rich’s Yale prize-winning first book by saying that “in art as in life, truthfulness is an absolute essential, good manners of enormous importance.” --W. H. Auden (Yale Younger Poets Prize); A.R. Poetry, 125). Ten years later, Rich reflected that her first two books represented a more “absolutist approach to the universe” (Adrienne Rich’s Poetry 89) and that her poems began to feel “queerly limited” both in expression and impact. Rich scrutinized her own history and found that her work was bleached, that she had “omitted” “disturbing elements to gain that perfection of order”.

With the publication of 1973’s Diving into the Wreck, Rich’s reviewers change and the tone of her poetry changes: she moves beyond the internalized subjectivity, madness and repression characterized in “Snapshots” to depict, in “Diving into the Wreck,” a first person allegory of a deep-sea adventure for feminist self-discovery and political empowerment. She also moves from expressing the woman as object—“you, once a belle in Shreveport”—to the woman as subject—“I am having to do this”. The metaphor of diving evokes feminist psychological process, excavating half-rotted parts of the self that have been sunk by misogynist culture. It also evokes the transformation of past tools, the rehabilitation in Rich’s intellectual development. She dives into her poetic past, redefining her decadent voice.

Her later work also explores the necessity of poetry as both an interaction and its record. Rich said in 1973 that “in the more recent poems something is happening, something has happened to me and, if I have been a good parent to the poem, something will happen to you who read it” (from Adrienne Rich’s Poetry, 89). Rich measures her success on her poetry’s affective power and on her ability to steward a poem that can transcend her own reality to transform another’s.
The collection Diving Into the Wreck was nominated for the National Book Award. Audre Lorde and Alice Walker were co-nominees; they wrote a collective statement when Rich won announcing that she was rejecting the award for herself, but that they would divide it equally, in the name of all silenced women. Rich’s values shifted significantly in the twenty years between her Yale prize and this collaboration. Lately I’ve been developing a strong sense that this shift, like the shift in Lorde’s career to an Afrocentric cosmology, signifies a much larger message about the political power of language: Lorde, Rich and Walker picked a conversation, choosing to whom, for whom, their poetry would speak at that moment.


To conclude, I’d like to discuss an actual conversation between Lorde and Rich that illustrates some of the possibilities and limits of this dialogic model of artistic community-building. In Sister Outsider, Lorde and Rich begin to discuss a prior phone conversation in which Rich was working through some thoughts about her now canonical anti-racist essay “Disloyal to Civilization.” They begin to detangle each other’s “modus” or epistemology following an exchange in which Lorde felt assaulted by Rich’s interrogations and Rich was frustrated by Lorde’s unwillingness to participate in what she felt was simply an open dialogue (104). So I’m going to read this really brief section and comment on what it thinks I suggest about poetic justice:

Lorde: “I’m used to associating a request for documentation as a
questioning of my perceptions, an attempt to devalue what I’m in the
process of discovering.”

Adrienne: “It’s not. Help me to perceive what you perceive. That’s what
I’m trying to say to you.

They go on discussing documentation and then, a few minutes later…

Audre: At certain stages that request for documentation is a blinder, a
questioning of my perceptions. Someone once said to me that I hadn’t documented the goddess in Africa, the woman bond that moves throughout The Black Unicorn. I had to laugh. I’m a poet, not a historian. I’ve shared my knowledge, I hope. Now you go document it, if you wish.


Lorde suggests to Rich that the “knowledge” she has to share is poetic, analytical certainly but, more importantly, evoking what is possible and what can be imagined, conceptualized through the open relation between self-aware subjects. Rich, in turn, urges Lorde to give her some more of that awareness, to understand across the open relation what may be possible and necessary in her own intellectual development. She also later emphasizes the need for her to do her own work in this, rather than placing the burden of clarity on Lorde.


This exchange invokes the productive tension I alluded to at the beginning of the paper: although each woman emphasizes self-knowledge and awareness, ultimately they both fall into a defensiveness around the need to shore up their own hard-won perceptions. Both women adhere, with some variations, to an erotic, poetic form of knowledge that is designed to create intense emotional reactions in themselves and others. But even this defensiveness is productive, because the willingness to use those complex poetic realities becomes the basis for community. The foundation is the commitment to the transformative power of poetry, of self-examination followed by hard labor and conversation. Ultimately, where this conversation ends up is that both women ask themselves and one another to look at the truth of the situation and use it with an eye to what is possible—in Lorde’s words, to ask, over and over again, “How much of this truth can I bear to see / and still live / unblinded?” Thank you.