After Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”
Author’s Note: One genre where I feel my writing has increased substantially since being at Agnes is poetry. Through this essay, I convey my thoughts and feelings over the existence and necessity of poetry. I hope you enjoy!
We hold these truths to be self-evident: life, death, and poetry.
Through poetry, we paint the truth of our existence. Whether it be 89 years of experience, or 50, or 20, or 9– all of it can be, in a way, lived through in as little as seven lines. With poetry, we can finally take off the foot at our throat. We use poetry as a way to breathe fully without strain. When writing poems, we can take pause, can exist in a moment free from time and space, analyzing both time and space. We use poetry as a language to form and fully realize those shapeless ideas and confounding emotions that have always been there scratching at the doors of our bodies to be released. Poetry serves as certificate that states boldly: we are alive, we are real, we are here, and we aren’t going anywhere.
Then we whose existences are often whittled down to one word: black, or gay, or trans, or disabled, or immigrant, can use poetry as validation of our experiences. Can show just how many identities, thoughts, dreams, actions, and emotions can fit in one body. We have always been threatening to erupt, and poetry waits for us with open arms and wails,
“Yes, I can take your broken, your weak, your horrors, your loves, give it to me all and I will never shut my gates.”
When I tell my father that I find poetry hard, one of the hardest things in life ever, and that I don’t consider myself a poet, he laughs–surprised every time. As if he was saying,
“It’s in your bones, girl,” and I, girl, was dancer who did not shake. But poetry is hard because it is difficult to be truthful, especially to ourselves. Poetry exists first as self-revelation. Even when we are writing about the simplest of moments, we are shocked as we sit down and see what they reveal. How many emotions and thoughts and wonders can you fit in, in the time it takes you to make the five-minute trip to the corner shop?
But perhaps W.H. Auden was right, that, “poetry makes nothing happen.” Because poetry in itself is just speaking truth that is already in existence. It is people’s perspectives that make it new. People, specifically the people who have never had to look, never had a deep-set questioning of what society has presented as right and wrong and a stark understanding of expectation vs. reality. When people like this see poetry made by the likes of I, and us, and we, they go “Wow.”, they go “I’ve never seen this before.” they go “I never would have thought!” When all you see is you, of course when you finally transcend the mirror, you will “discover” a newfoundland that has always been there, teeming with other.
When regimens take power, the people who they come for first are the scholars and the creatives. Poets have been jailed, murdered, crushed by their own implications of self. They want us silenced. What is a more effective way to test if something bears weight, then to get rid of it? Slaveholders made sure that no slave could read or write, and yet, no matter how horrendous the times were, my ancestors still sung, and what is song, if not poetry?
If we silence ourselves, if we fail to consume and to write our truths, then we must become secret police infiltrating our own lives, ending any experience and moment that could hold fuel and inspiration for us to put pen to paper. And I’ll tell you what type of existence that is
Poetry as truth then becomes an act of resistance. Resistance from the powers that be. Resistance and rejection that white, man, able, european is the existence that is the truest. We reject the binary, we reject the notion that this is all there is. With poetry, we carve out a tradition that is both new and ancient. We are opening our doors, we are bearing ourselves –naked and raw, we are sending an invitation to the cosmos. It is your choice to accept it or not.
And if poetry can really save neither nations or people, let it at least give remembrance. Let us lay our dead to rest. Let us pay homage to those who have past, and ourselves. In it, we bear witness. In it, we are realized. Whether we are writing in dark times or simpler ones, it is necessary to write at all, because poetry is proof of our undeniably human existence. We are here: we rage, love, cry, laugh, live, and die. Poetry documents the full range of our humanity and the wonders and horrors of our world. When the aliens come, they will have to look no further.
And what can we do, but offer what we have?
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