An Analysis Of Audre Lorde's Poetry

Lorna Dee Cervantes' poem, “Poema para los Californios Muertos” (“Poem for the Dead Californios”), is a commentary on what happened to the original inhabitants of California when California was still Mexico, and an address to the speaker's dead ancestors. Utilizing a unique dynamic, consistently alternating between Spanish and English, Cervantes accurately represents the fear, hatred, and humility experienced by the “Californios” through rhythm, arrangement, tone, and most importantly, through use of language.

For this journal entry, I chose to compare Audre Lorde's Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference to the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards. In Lorde's piece, she talks about how oppressed people are often taught to ignore the fact that they are oppressed. We are taught to handle the difference we face by either ignoring them, copying them or destroying them. Lorde says that society as a whole has failed to see differences as a "springboard for creative change." Her article focuses on the fact that refusing to see creative differences makes it impossible to see the different problems and pitfalls women face. Some problems all women share and other problems all women do not share. For example, the experience of a white woman is different

The irony in the challenges of life is that it helps us build character. But the irony in truth is that often times its right in front of us. Can we all subconsciously be capable of carrying ourselves within a barrier of “truths”? As a poet, writer, and political activist, Audre Lorde’s “The Fourth of July” describes an image of how much her mother rationalizes with certain truths: “As usual, whatever my mother did not like and could not change, she ignored” (222). Growing up in an era of segregation, and coming to terms with the realities of how cruel the world could be; as a result, sharing less than the truth was used as a barrier of protection. Nonetheless, in times of social injustice and racism, some truths come to light surrounded with

Rituals, teachings, ceremonies and identities of the Aboriginal people were lost and neglected in the past. Even today, those of the culture continue to heal and strengthen from the consequences. In Louise Halfe’s poem “My Ledders,” a native woman addresses the Pope expressing her passionate feelings towards the traditions that were robbed of her culture, while pleading him to change the teachings back to the original way. In the letter the speaker writes as if she was speaking, using phonetic spelling and broken English, asking the Pope if he could use his power to retain the native culture, as the government may listen to him. Directly linking the losses of native traditions, customs and languages to the residential school system,

Welcome and thankyou to this discussion on celebrating a poet whose powerful language engages and influences others. The poet whose contributions demonstrate these features is Maya Angelou whose influence is evident in the poetry she produced. Maya Angelou is an American poet and civil rights activist, born in 1928 whose poetry is famous for its inspiration and is considered ‘one of the great voices of contemporary literature.’ (Metacritic, 2015) Maya Angelou’s personal and cultural experiences communicate the power of the African- Americans during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960’s and 1970s era to overcome adversity and oppression that are clearly reflected in her inspirational poems ‘Caged Bird’ and ‘Still I Rise.’ An analysis of these poems reveals that

In presenting herself as a child on the verge of adulthood, Lorde indicated to the reader that the things she learned at this time would be pivotal and important for the rest of her life. For example, at the beginning of her essay, Lorde wrote that her trip to Washington D.C. was “on the edge of the summer when I was supposed to stop being a child” (221). In this way, Lorde’s trip to the nation’s capital and her experiences of discrimination there provided an intellectual

“I decided that it was not wisdom that enabled poets to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean” (Socrates). What does it mean to be this type of poet? How can someone accomplish such success in poetry, the answer is just two words Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson spent a large portion of her life in isolation, not because she was forced to or because she was ill, Dickinson simply wanted to be alone and because of her isolation she became one of the greatest female poets of all time. Emily Dickinson set the bar high for other female poets and created some of the most renowned poems in the world. The two poems “The Soul Selects Her Own Society” and “Tell all the Truth but Tell it Slant” are drastically different poems that tell two different stories, but there are some aspects that cause them to be similar: Imagery, tone, and the statement that the two poems make.

Initially, Collins demonstrates how one can weigh a dog’s weight with his method. Concrete diction in the first stanza, such as, “ small bathroom”, “ balancing”, and “shaky” suggest the uncomfortable nature of his intimate relationship with his pet. Although Collin is unappreciated for the gritty toil determination, he praise himself to applauded that “this is the way” and raising his self-esteem by comparing how easier it is than to train his dog obesity. In addition, the negative diction used to describe Collin holding his dog to be “awkward” for him and “bewildering” for his pet. This establish he rather force love rather willing show patience. When holding a pet on scale, there is less hustle because he secures the dog’s position by carrying it. Where as when he orders the dog to stay on the weighing scale with a cookie, his dog only followed him because of the expected reward.

In her essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference”, Audre Lorde details multiple groups of people and their actions and attitudes. She focuses on and criticizes different demographics’ actions and how they impede the achievement of equality for people like herself. She portrays the disenfranchisement and underappreciation she receives multilaterally because of her race, social class, sexual orientation, age, gender. Lorde’s prevailing goal of the essay is to demonstrate that the marginalized should not nullify, ignore, suppress, or attack the expression of differences between themselves. Rather, she asserts that they should recognize and celebrate those differences to unite across demographic boundaries so they may together

The poem, “A Woman Speaks” by Audre Lorde is a both a confessional and identity poem. She is not only addressing her internal battle and self-suffering, but also discussing the societal inequities African American women were suffering in the United States. The poem’s diction, on the surface, produces a tranquil tone to the poem. This facet of tranquility in the poem is used to express how her battle against inequity will not be fought with violence or hatred, and how she is not blaming any specific party or institution for her personal suffering. She instead plans to use the power and beauty of words to communicate the flaws of the image of women, fight against injustice and racism, and alleviate her internal despair. “A Woman Speaks” by Audre Lorde is an anthem for African American women and uses vivid imagery, ancestral references, and a call to action to connect to the reader and enact a fight against the underrepresentation of African American women.

Akin to intersectional romance fiction, poetry is equivalently as radical. Poetry magnifies the significance of language as a revolutionary tool, one that liberates women and cultivates an environment in which women are free to address their aspirations and anxieties while condemning the ideals of a society that operates under the canons of male chauvinism. In a collection of letters published as a tribute to the late Audre Lorde in Off Our Backs, a feminist newspaper journal written for women by women, one anonymous contributor discusses how Lorde “encourages all women to find their own means of expression, their own poetry to value and to use” (Tyler 32) in her piece “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”. In the piece, Lorde discusses how for women, poetry is not a nonessential indulgence, as Caucasian men throughout history have suggested through how they render poetry as an opportunity to “cover [a] desperate wish for imagination without insight” (Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” 36). Lorde contends that poetry is a “vital necessity of [the] existence” (Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” 36) of women because it establishes the infrastructure on which women “predicate [their] hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” 36). Lorde’s text motivates women to exercise “the power of the word, a freedom for women greatly feared by…patriarchal society” (Tyler 32). Lorde states the poetry

Audre Lorde was born on February 18, 1934 in New York City to immigrant parents from the West Indies. She learned to talk, read, and write somewhere around the age of four and wrote her first poem in eighth grade, which was then published in Seventeen magazine. In 1962, Lorde married a man named Edward Rollins and had two children before they divorced in 1970. However, in 1968 she moved to Tougaloo, Mississippi and met her long-term partner, Frances Clayton. Her earliest poems were often romantic, but in the 1960s became more politically centered due to the amount of civil unrest combined with confusion over her own sexuality. At the time many of her poems were written, more than one-fifth of the nation lived below the poverty line, and

In a Tumblr Q&A, singer-songwriter Lorde, made known to fans that she once wanted to be a comedian - as Lorde replied to a question on what she would be doing if she was not in the music industry. The pop star described in detail that she would be "at university studying law" before the singer made adding that she once wanted to be a comedian.

Despite the vast quantity of similarities that Adichie and Lorde’s pieces have, they also differ in many aspects. In the first place, Lorde includes more forms of oppression. For example, she talks about how age and physical impairment can affect how a person if viewed in society (e.g. is that person capable of performing physical functions at their workplace?). Moreover, Lorde talks about how women in the Third World are portrayed by the West. However, she is not able to give firsthand accounts for those claims. Whereas Adichie, comes from a Third World country and is able to provide personal testimonies and experiences on how that affects her when she travels to a country in the West. For example, she tells the story on how, when she got

Audre Lorde’s poem, Coal, explores the idea of repression and the freedom of speech. On first reading of the text, the poem seems to be built around an idea of anger towards repressing one’s individual thoughts and not voicing personal opinion. However, through a deconstructive reading, there are inconsistencies within the text’s language that question whether the speaker is referring to the forceful repression of spoken words or other motifs like femininity, power and self worth within an individual’s voice. By examining the verbal, textual, and linguistic stages of Coal, one can see the contradictions, discontinuities, and unreliability in relation to one another within the poem.