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4.54 AVERAGE
4.54 AVERAGE
“It is possible to shoot a man in self-defense and still notice how his red blood decorates the snow” …yeah
challenging
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
The prose parts: 4🌟
The poems: 3🌟
The poems: 3🌟
Finishing the year with this wonderful collection of Lorde’s well-known and less well-known works. Nothing more I can add about Lorde’s writing itself, whether poetry or prose, but this collection is nearly definitive in presenting all that is good and necessary about her work.
As with [b: Sister Outsider|32951|Sister Outsider Essays and Speeches|Audre Lorde|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1168407974l/32951._SY75_.jpg|716939], I value what I can learn from Audre's perspective on intersectional feminism and living as a Black person in America; her prose is where I connect with her best, because I feel that her prose is where she is the most deliberate about making herself understood by others.
Prose
In some of my favorite parts of "A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer", there are shared ideas with [b: Hope in the Dark|28048|Hope in the Dark|Rebecca Solnit|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388245698l/28048._SY75_.jpg|75603], mindfulness meditation, Bell Hooks, and Ursula K. Le Guin:
Poetry
Her poetry, on the other hand, speaks purely from within, which makes it less accessible to me as someone without the shared experience of being Black. The way I feel about Audre Lorde's poetry is concisely described by this excerpt from "An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich," in [b: Sister Outsider|32951|Sister Outsider Essays and Speeches|Audre Lorde|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1168407974l/32951._SY75_.jpg|716939] (p. 102-103):
It's important to me that I try to understand her, but much of her poetry is bewildering to me. She uses very little punctuation, and her ideas and phrases run together in a way that allows for multiple competing interpretations. Sometimes multiple metaphors are mixed together in a single phrase. For example, see "New York City 1970": "How do you spell change like frayed slogan underwear / with the emptied can of yesterday's meanings / with yesterday's names? / And what does the we-bird see with / who has lost its I's?" I can feel the general sense--the tone, the emotional tenor--of this opening, but it's particular meaning is lost to me.
When I can understand her--when there are enough overlaps in our lived experience that I can see what she's trying to show me--her poetry is gorgeous. Of the 71 poems in this collection, I was able to understand and connect to only 17. I wish I could understand more; maybe after some time away from Audre, she'll make more sense to me.
I. Familial Love
She has many poems dedicated to love: familial love, erotic love, complex/broken love, love across and strengthened by difference. Her poetry on familial love is particularly striking for its ability to capture the nuance in relationships that contain love, heartbreak, grief, isolation, and sacrifice. Particularly frequent in her poetry is the love of a mother for her children in all its different flavors, especially that of a black mother for her black children living in America. "Suffer the Children" (1968) discusses her grief regarding the murder of Black children in America:
"Conclusion" (1973) is about the differences in perceptions between her and her white ex-husband, who enabled her to have her two children. I love the way she shows the difference between being a Black or white parent in America: as a Black parent, your dreams are in the very long term, hope that faith and hard work will lead to a world where your children are safe. As a white parent, your dreams are "full of... forgiveness / and a meek jesus [...] / [...] whose braying / does not include a future tense." White parents aren't kept up at night by nightmares for their children's safety -- and their dreams and religious faith are in the present tense, because they already have all they need.
"Progress Report" (1970) speaks to the complex relationship between a mother and daughter:
II. Erotic Love
Audre Lorde's essay "Uses of the Erotic" was my foothold into reading her work. As expected, then, eroticism was a recurring theme. At the end of her essay "My Mother's Mortar," I scrawled in the margins: "Audre Lorde can write a more sensual essay about cooking than most romance writers can write about sex." Audre's erotic sensibilities shine in her poetry just as they do in her prose. From "On a night of the full moon":
III. Oppression
The poems "The End of Cooperative Living" (1973) and "One Year to Life on the Grand Central Shuttle" (1974) express the frustration, rage, and despair of living under oppression. "The End of Cooperative Living" speaks to the hell that is living in close proximity with many other poor people; the poem evokes the "crabs in a bucket" theory of social behavior, identity-politics infighting on the left, and environmental racism; she asserts that the dreams of the poor are the creative life-force of a city. From "The End of Cooperative Living":
"One Year to Life" focuses on the frustration of people willing to continue playing by the rules of a society that doesn't value them in the hope that one day their luck will improve:
Her poetry has a through-line of isolation, because it is so difficult to communicate from the depressed emotional place of oppression. From "A Sewerplant Grows In Harlem" (1974):
Prose
In some of my favorite parts of "A Burst of Light: Living with Cancer", there are shared ideas with [b: Hope in the Dark|28048|Hope in the Dark|Rebecca Solnit|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1388245698l/28048._SY75_.jpg|75603], mindfulness meditation, Bell Hooks, and Ursula K. Le Guin:
9 Feb 1984: "Afraid is a country where they issue us passports at birth and hope we never seek citizenship in any other country."
9 Jun 1984 (Berlin): "Survival isn't some theory operating in a vacuum. It's a matter of my everyday living and making decisions. / How do I hold faith with sun in a sunless place? It is so hard not to counter this despair with a refusal to see. [...] I have to stay open and filtering no matter what's coming at me [...] When I'm open, I'm also less despairing."
20 Jun 1984: "If the white women's movement does not learn from its errors, like any other movement, it will die by them." / "While we fortify ourselves with visions of the future, we must arm ourselves with accurate perceptions of the barriers between us and that future."
28 May 1984, regarding her daughter's graduation from college and moving into adult life: "I feel she's on her way now in a specific sense that must leave me behind, and that is both sad and very reassuring to me. I am convinced that Beth has the stuff--the emotional and psychic wherewithal to do whatever she needs to do for her living, and I have given her the best I have to offer. [...] I bless the goddess that I am still here to see it."
25 Oct 1985 (East Lansing, MI): "Sitting with Black women from all over the earth has made me think a great deal about what it means to be indigenous, and what my relationship as a Black woman in North America is to the land-rights struggles of the indigenous peoples of this land, to Native American Indian women, and how we can translate that consciousness into a new level of working together. In other words, how can we use each other's difference in our common battles for a livable future? / All of our children are prey. How do we raise them not to prey upon themselves and each other? And this is why we cannot be silent, because our silences will come to testify against us out of the mouths of our children."
16 Dec 1985: "Hope as a living state that propels us, open-eyed and fearful, into all the battles of our lives. And some of those battles we do not win. / But some of them we do."
6 Nov 1986 (New York City): "Racism. Cancer. In both cases, to win the aggressor must conquer, but the resisters need only survive. How do I define that survival and on whose terms?"
8 Nov 1986, on being diagnosed with terminal liver cancer and continuing her fights against racism and heterosexism: "None of these struggles are every easy, and even the smallest victory is never to be taken for granted. Each victory must be applauded, because it is so easy not to battle at all, to just accept and call that acceptance inevitable."
8 Nov 1986: "The tensions created inside me by the contradictions is another source of energy and learning. I have always known I learn my most lasting lessons about difference by closely attending the ways in which the differences inside me lie down together."
12 Nov 1986: "I acknowledge the painful savor uncertainty lends to my living. I use the energy of dreams that are now impossible, not totally believing in them nor their power to become real, but recognizing them as templates for a future within which my labors can play a part. I am freer to choose what I will devote my energies toward and what I will leave for another lifetime, thanking the goddess for the strength to perceive that I can choose, despite obstacles."
13 Nov 1986: "Sometimes we are blessed with being able to choose the time and the arena and the manner of our revolution, but more usually we must do battle wherever we are standing."
15 Nov 1986: "I revel in the beauty of [my people]. [...] They are discrete bits of ammunition in my arsenal against despair. [...] They whisper to me of joy when the light is dim, when I falter, when another Black child is gunned down [...]"
19 Nov 1986: "Learning not to crumple before these uncertainties fuels my resolve to print myself upon the texture of each day fully rather than forever."
14 Dec 1986: "One of the hardest things to accept is learning to live within uncertainty and neither deny it nor hide behind it. [...] This is my life. Each hour is a possibility not to be banked. These days are not a preparation for living, some necessary but essentially extraneous divergence from the main course of my living. They are my life."
Poetry
Her poetry, on the other hand, speaks purely from within, which makes it less accessible to me as someone without the shared experience of being Black. The way I feel about Audre Lorde's poetry is concisely described by this excerpt from "An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich," in [b: Sister Outsider|32951|Sister Outsider Essays and Speeches|Audre Lorde|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1168407974l/32951._SY75_.jpg|716939] (p. 102-103):
Audre: I've never forgotten the impatience in your voice that time on the telephone, when you said, "It's not enough to say to me that you intuit it." Do you remember? I will never forget that. Even at the same time that I understood what you meant, I felt like a total wipeout of my modus, my way of perceiving and formulating.
Adrienne: Yes, but it's not a wipeout of your modus. [...] There's a way in which, trying to translate from your experience to mine, I do need to hear chapter and verse from time to time. [...] If I ask for documentation [i.e., further explanation, a description of your internal logic, etc.], it's because I take seriously the spaces between us that difference has created, that racism has created. There are times when I simply cannot assume that I know what you know, unless you show me what you mean.
Audre: 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. [...] It's not that I can just accept your perceptions unblinkingly. Some of them are very hard for me. But I don't want to deny them. I know I can't afford to.
It's important to me that I try to understand her, but much of her poetry is bewildering to me. She uses very little punctuation, and her ideas and phrases run together in a way that allows for multiple competing interpretations. Sometimes multiple metaphors are mixed together in a single phrase. For example, see "New York City 1970": "How do you spell change like frayed slogan underwear / with the emptied can of yesterday's meanings / with yesterday's names? / And what does the we-bird see with / who has lost its I's?" I can feel the general sense--the tone, the emotional tenor--of this opening, but it's particular meaning is lost to me.
When I can understand her--when there are enough overlaps in our lived experience that I can see what she's trying to show me--her poetry is gorgeous. Of the 71 poems in this collection, I was able to understand and connect to only 17. I wish I could understand more; maybe after some time away from Audre, she'll make more sense to me.
I. Familial Love
She has many poems dedicated to love: familial love, erotic love, complex/broken love, love across and strengthened by difference. Her poetry on familial love is particularly striking for its ability to capture the nuance in relationships that contain love, heartbreak, grief, isolation, and sacrifice. Particularly frequent in her poetry is the love of a mother for her children in all its different flavors, especially that of a black mother for her black children living in America. "Suffer the Children" (1968) discusses her grief regarding the murder of Black children in America:
Pity for him who suffers from his waste.
Water that flows from the earth
For lack of roots to hold it
And children who are murdered
Before their lives begin.
[...] who will dis-inter these girls
To love the women they were to become
Or read the legends written beneath their skin?
Those who loved them remember their child's laughter.
But he whose hate has robbed him of their good
Has yet to weep at night above their graves.
[...] Someday
A man will thirst for sleep in his southern night
Seeking his peace where no peace is
And come to mourn these children
Given to the dust.
"Conclusion" (1973) is about the differences in perceptions between her and her white ex-husband, who enabled her to have her two children. I love the way she shows the difference between being a Black or white parent in America: as a Black parent, your dreams are in the very long term, hope that faith and hard work will lead to a world where your children are safe. As a white parent, your dreams are "full of... forgiveness / and a meek jesus [...] / [...] whose braying / does not include a future tense." White parents aren't kept up at night by nightmares for their children's safety -- and their dreams and religious faith are in the present tense, because they already have all they need.
[...] I believe in love as I believe in our children
but I was born Black and without illusions
and my vision
which differs from yours
is clear
although sometimes restricted.
I have watched you at midnight
moving through casual sleep
wishing I could afford the non-desperate dreams
that stir you
to wither and fade into partial solutions.
Your nights are wintery long and very young
full of symbols of purity and forgiveness
and a meek jesus that rides through your cities
on a barren ass whose braying
does not include a future tense.
[...] when I dream
I move through a Black land
where the future
glows eternal and green
but where the symbols for now
are bloody and unrelenting
rooms
where confused children
[...] cannot pick up their marbles
and run away home
whenever nightmare threatens.
"Progress Report" (1970) speaks to the complex relationship between a mother and daughter:
These days
when you do say hello I am never sure
if you are being saucy or experimental or
merely protecting some new position.
Sometimes you gurgle while asleep
and I know tender places still intrigue you.
Now
when you question me on love
shall I recommend a dictionary
or myself?
You are the child of wind and ravens I created
always my daughter
I cannot recognize
the currents where you swim and dart
through my loving
upstream to your final place of birth
but you never tire of hearing
how I crept out of my mother's house
at dawn, with an olive suitcase
crammed with books and fraudulent letters
and an unplayed guitar.
Sometimes I see myself flash through your eyes
in a moment
caught between history and obedience
that moment grows each day
[...] until I see
all kinds of loving still intrigue you
as you grow more and more
dark
rude and tender
and unafraid.
II. Erotic Love
Audre Lorde's essay "Uses of the Erotic" was my foothold into reading her work. As expected, then, eroticism was a recurring theme. At the end of her essay "My Mother's Mortar," I scrawled in the margins: "Audre Lorde can write a more sensual essay about cooking than most romance writers can write about sex." Audre's erotic sensibilities shine in her poetry just as they do in her prose. From "On a night of the full moon":
The curve of your body
fits my waiting hand
your flesh warm as sunlight
your lips quick as young birds
between your thighs the sweet
sharp taste of limes. [...]
III. Oppression
The poems "The End of Cooperative Living" (1973) and "One Year to Life on the Grand Central Shuttle" (1974) express the frustration, rage, and despair of living under oppression. "The End of Cooperative Living" speaks to the hell that is living in close proximity with many other poor people; the poem evokes the "crabs in a bucket" theory of social behavior, identity-politics infighting on the left, and environmental racism; she asserts that the dreams of the poor are the creative life-force of a city. From "The End of Cooperative Living":
I am so glad to be moving
away from this prison for black and white faces
assaulting each other with our joint oppression
competing for who pays the highest price for this privilege
[...] [my] smile shatters
on the 'in' thing that races
dictator through our hallways
[...] avoiding me in the corridors
dropping their load on my face down 24 stories
of lives in a spectrumed madhouse
pavilion of gnats and nightmare remembering
once we all saved like beggars
to buy our way into this castle of fantasy and forever now
I am so glad to be moving.
[...] Although workmen will
[...] charge me with the exact amount
of whatever I have coming back to me
called equity
I am so glad to be moving
from the noise of psychic footsteps
beating a tune that is not my own
louder than any other sound in the neighborhood
except the blasting that goes on all day and all night
from the city's new toilet being built
outside the main entrance
from the spirits [...]
bellowing secrets of living hells revealed
but not shared [...]
But when this grim house goes
slipping into the sewer prepared for it
then this whole city can read
its own obituary
written on the broken record of dreams
of ordinary people
who wanted what they could not get [...]
"One Year to Life" focuses on the frustration of people willing to continue playing by the rules of a society that doesn't value them in the hope that one day their luck will improve:
If we hate the rush hour subways
who ride them every day
why hasn't there been a New York City Subway Riot
some bloody rush-hour revolution
where a snarl
goes on from push to a shove
that does not stop
[...]
to a last chance or hope of change.
But hope is counter-revolutionary.
Pressure cooks
but we have not exploded
flowing in and out instead each day
[...] watering down each trip's fury
is the someday foolish hope
that at the next stop
some door will open for us
to fresh air and light and home.
Her poetry has a through-line of isolation, because it is so difficult to communicate from the depressed emotional place of oppression. From "A Sewerplant Grows In Harlem" (1974):
Have you ever risen in the night
bursting with knowledge and the world
dissolves toward any listening ear
into which you can pour
whatever it was you knew
before waking
Only to find all ears asleep
or drugged perhaps by a dream of words
because as you scream into them over and over
nothing stirs
and the mind you have reached is not a working mind
please hang up and die again? The mind
you have reached is not a working mind
Please hang up
And die again.
Audre Lorde strangely freaks me out. I wanted to get into her so bad, but the
incest-y part killed it for me. Too many intrusive thoughts from her for me.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Incest
informative
reflective
I usually run the other way when conversations of death come up. Audre Lorde’s battle with cancer and her slowly coming to terms with the inevitable is hard to read. She talks about it with such honesty and so much detail that I had to put it down several times throughout the journal entries in “A Burst of Light.” Though I cannot and do not want to relate with this essay, I’ve never read anything like it. Like all of her other essays, I had to pause and contemplate the way in which she wrote about something or her views on a topic.
I’ve read her essays multiple times in my political theory classes. I’ve written many essays involving “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” But reading her works side by side was really immersive and I gained a better understanding on her perspective. This is a must read. I cannot stress that enough. She’s honest and frank with the “well-intentioned” white people she came into contact with. Her accounts have made me think critically of my own actions and how I personally need to change.
The first half of this book is a 5+ star. However, I don’t usually enjoy poetry (which is what the last half of this book consists of). So, it sat on my nightstand for months and is the reason I dropped a star. But that doesn’t have much to do with Lorde, and more to do with me.
Some quotes:
“As a living creature I am part of two kinds of forces— growth and decay, sprouting and withering, living and dying— and at any given moment of our lives, each one of us is actively located somewhere along a continuum between these two forces.”
“But it is also true that sometimes we cannot heal ourselves close to the very people from whom we draw strength and light, because they are also closest to the places and tastes and smells that go along with a pattern of living we are trying to rearrange.”
I’ve read her essays multiple times in my political theory classes. I’ve written many essays involving “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” But reading her works side by side was really immersive and I gained a better understanding on her perspective. This is a must read. I cannot stress that enough. She’s honest and frank with the “well-intentioned” white people she came into contact with. Her accounts have made me think critically of my own actions and how I personally need to change.
The first half of this book is a 5+ star. However, I don’t usually enjoy poetry (which is what the last half of this book consists of). So, it sat on my nightstand for months and is the reason I dropped a star. But that doesn’t have much to do with Lorde, and more to do with me.
Some quotes:
“As a living creature I am part of two kinds of forces— growth and decay, sprouting and withering, living and dying— and at any given moment of our lives, each one of us is actively located somewhere along a continuum between these two forces.”
“But it is also true that sometimes we cannot heal ourselves close to the very people from whom we draw strength and light, because they are also closest to the places and tastes and smells that go along with a pattern of living we are trying to rearrange.”
absolutely loved the prose section and am so excited to read the rest of her full-length collections. it was a lot of poetry to get through and it would probably be better to dip in and out of it, but still obviously beautifully written. i listened to the last 30% on audio and appreciated hearing the poems spoken even more than reading them!
she changed my life with uses of the erotic, talking about how we need to look at all aspects of our life through the lens of the joy we know we’re capable of feeling, and see what aspects do/don’t align with that feeling:
“For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”
Really solid collection of essays and poems from Audre Lorde! It's not my most favorite compilation of essays, as it didn't necessarily feel as tightly cohesive as some of her others I've read, but I do think that's sort of par for the course with a "Best Of" type approach such as this. It was actually my first time reading Lorde's poetry, and I enjoyed it overall, but I can't say it's my absolute favorite.
challenging
emotional
inspiring
medium-paced