The Poetry Of Audre Lorde

What is poetry? Is poetry about your feelings? Is poetry meant for you to deliberate or read between the lines? Elizabeth Alexander, a black educator that teaches poetry, believes that poetry is where you are your true self and finding yourself. In 2005, she published one of her poems called “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe.” She constructed the poem to speak to her students about her meaning of poetry. Poetry causes various emotions, various content, and based on various forms of realities.

Poetry is considered to be a representational text in which one explores ideas by using symbols. Poetry can be interpreted many different ways and is even harder to interpret when the original author has come and gone. Poetry is an incredible form of literature because the way it has the ability to use the reader as part of its own power. In other words, poetry uses the feelings and past experiences of the reader to interpret things differently from one to another, sometimes not even by choice of the author. Two famous poets come to mind to anybody who has ever been in an English class, Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings. Both of these poets have had numerous famous pieces due to the fact that they both

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

“Poetry is Not a Luxury,” written by Audre Lorde in 1985, explores the ways in which poetry inspires freedom and change amongst women and people of color who do not have a voice. Lorde describes herself as a “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” (Poetry Foundation), an experienced outsider to society, therefore the goal of her writing is to empower those who feel powerless. Lorde

“She had plans to publish more poetry, including thirteen letters and thirty-three poems. In 1830, her poetry was rediscovered by the new England Abolitionists.” (Baym 763) From the rediscovering of her work some over the earlier information about her was corrected and many people where more understanding of her and her work. People saw her as an important literary figure because she was the first educated African American person to have published

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

In our class discussions and reading, I learned that women were once in charge of the human race, women were a part of a community, no race was inferior or superior, there was peace and harmony in the world until the patriarchal era came, planning to embed itself in the ground for a long time. Women were raped of their identity, their race and their status in society. Men ruled the biblical stories, leaving Mary out. Hence, the war started between the races, women fought to gain their identity back and to do so, they started with writing. One of those women was Audre Lorde. Audre Lorde was raised in a very sheltered family. She was protected by her mother who believed that white people should not be trusted. Seeing her mother

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 in New York City the 18th of February 1934 of Caribbean immigrants. As a child, the author had difficulties in communication that made her acknowledge poetry and its power as a form of expression, allowing her to become a writer, a feminist, and a civil rights activist. Which is very strong in “Age, Race, Class, and Sex” in which the author describes her feelings using a style of superior journalism with elements of popular culture that leads to racial issues. In order to emphasize more her sociological argument, Lorde uses personal experience as ethos. “As a forty-nine- year- old Black lesbian feminist socialist, mother of two including one boy, and member an inter- racial couple, I usually find myself a part of some group defined as other, deviant, inferior, or just plain wrong”(Lorde, 114). Audre Lorde strength is in her inferiority and points out very actual issues such as: distortion of relationship between oppressor and oppressed and the misnamed differences that still leads to racism.

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

Webster defines poetry as literary work in which special intensity is given to the expression of feelings and ideas by the use of distinctive style and rhythm. Rhetoric is only the art of writing and speaking effectively while poetry is the art of speaking emotionally and freely. Lorde says that poetry is to killing yourself as rhetoric is to killing your children. The first lines of the poem is Lorde calling the readers to action, and telling them to put their children first. Feeling fury over the case against Thomas Shea, in the first stanza, in the first four lines of the poem, Lorde tells us that it doesn’t matter the crime or the race, children must come before hatred. She emphasizes on this in the next stanza.

Emily Dickinson is the creator of some of the most famous works in American poetry. Throughout the 1800s, the author dedicated her life to poetry. She used metaphors in an advanced way and displayed power through her unique use of diction. Emily’s immense power with words derived from her determination. Dickinson’s determination to achieve individuality and power is exemplified through her complex poetry and derived from the events that occurred in her life.

Emily Dickinson is an American poet born in Amherst Massachusetts December tenth, 1830. As a child Dickinson’s love for books was massive yet she did not start writing poetry until she was eighteen. However, she was not known of until after her death. Nonetheless, some people other than her family did now about Dickinson’s remarkable poems. Furthermore, most tried encouraging her to publish her poems yet others did the contrary. Emily Dickinson’s life is what caused her to write such great poetry.

Emily Dickinson is one of the most interesting female poets of the nineteenth century. Every author has unique characteristics about him/her that make one poet different from another, but what cause Emily Dickinson to be so unique are not only the words she writes, but how she writes them. Her style of writing is in a category of its own. To understand how and why she writes the way she does, her background has to be brought into perspective. Every poet has inspiration, negative or positive, that contributes not only to the content of the writing itself, but the actual form of writing the author uses to express his/her personal talents. Emily Dickinson is no different. Her childhood and adult experiences and culture form