Audre Lorde: Poetry, Feminism, Mythography

“Poetry is perhaps the most subversive form of art there is because it intends to bring about change, change in the deepest sense which is concerned with feelings. Poetry comes out of feelings, it works with feelings, and it alters the very essence of our lives.” — Audre Lorde

Depending on where you look, Audre Lorde is best known as a feminist, poet, activist, warrior, essayist, cancer survivor, teacher, lover, publisher, philosopher, or something else entirely. In this seminar, we look at Lorde as a thinker who refused to separate these roles and who instead approached poetry, prose, and the experience of living itself as a single, unified practice. This course examines the ontological and epistemological implications of her theory and practice of poetry as a way of life.

While our readings and discussions will be grounded in poetry, they will refract outward to include Lorde’s essays, speeches, letters, interviews, teaching notes and lectures, as well as her innovation of “biomythography.” Lorde’s work demands to be read on its own terms: she teaches us, above all, to devise method from thought, not to impose method on thought. “Poetry,” she insists, “is not a luxury.” It is a mode of survival and a way of generating and regenerating our lives.

Her feminism, too, grows out of her poetic faith, practice, and beliefs. We will follow the interconnected threads of her thinking across major selections from her work, while also looking at the writers and thinkers who shaped her, such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and at how her thought developed in conversation with contemporaries like Adrienne Rich, June Jordan, and Barbara Smith, as well as with those who came after and carried her influence forward, including bell hooks and Gloria Anzaldúa. We will consider poetry as a life method; the erotic as a political force; and poetry as a mode through which Lorde saw, felt, thought, and moved through the world. What methods does Lorde propose for living, thinking, writing, and being together? What does it mean to take poetry seriously as a force capable of altering the very essence of our lives?

We will draw from Sister Outsider, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, The Black Unicorn, Cables to Rage, From a Land Where Other People Live, Undersong, Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, 1974–1989, Dream of Europe, and more.