Poetry is Not a Luxury

By Audre Lorde

[...]

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.


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When people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read in school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy.

A tough life needs a tough language, and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers, a language powerful enough to say how it is.

– Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

When I went to law school and I decided to be a lawyer, I didn’t want to be, like, a lawyer and a poet. What I wanted was to be a lawyer-poet.

And, so, the redacted poems are sort of my first attempt at making the legal work become poetry and making these legal documents become literature. Somebody filed a lawsuit on behalf of these people, but the lawsuit is 70 pages long. Who was actually reading that lawsuit to get an understanding of what happened? Nobody but court actors.

I wanted to make it represent what I think justice sounds like. And I wanted to turn it into a poem and I wanted to redact everything that was superfluous so that when you pick it up and read it, you say that this is the thing that matters. This is the thing that makes you hurt.

– Reginald Dwayne Betts, interview with NPR

Reginald Dwayne Betts, In Missouri, from Felon, 2019

By Dorianne Laux

I wish I could say I was the kind of child
who watched the moon from her window,
would turn toward it and wonder.
I never wondered. I read. Dark signs
that crawled toward the edge of the page.
It took me years to grow a heart
from paper and glue. All I had
was a flashlight, bright as the moon,
a white hole blazing beneath the sheets.

By Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose of every social encounter.

– June Jordan, Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint

By Ronda Slater

What I need is
an angular man
with muscles and bones
built for thrusting
or maybe

what I need is
a satin-skinned woman
with fingers that dance
on my body
or maybe

what I need is
a Trojan Horse lover
who is really a woman
named Helen, in hiding,
or maybe

what I need is
a magical man
who grows gardens of herbs
and heals with the laying
on of his hands
or maybe

what I need is
a lyrical lady
with hair down to here
who writes poems and songs
about me for a change,
or maybe

what I need is
a sensual socialist
androgynous feminist
who doesn't smoke cigarettes
or maybe

love is like water
and when you find out
you need it, who cares
where it comes from,
or maybe

everyone is a well
just waiting for me
to send my ladle down.

Zoe Leonard, I Want A President, 1992

By Marge Piercy

What can they do to you?
Whatever they want...

They can set you up, bust you,
they can break your fingers,
burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you
can't walk, can't remember.
they can take away your children,
wall up your lover;
they can do anything you can't stop them doing.

How can you stop them?
Alone you can fight, you can refuse.
You can take whatever revenge you can
But they roll right over you.

But two people fighting
back to back can cut through
a mob, a snake-dancing file
can break a cordon, an army
can meet an army.

Two people can keep each other sane
can give support, conviction,
love, massage, hope, sex.

Three people are a delegation
a cell, a wedge.
With four you can play games
and start a collective.
With six you can rent a whole house
have pie for dinner with no seconds
and make your own music.

A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care to act
it starts when you do it again
after they said no,

it starts when you say We
and know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.

By Danez Smith

O California, don’t you know the sun is only a god
if you learn to starve for him? I’m bored with the ocean
I stood at the lip of it, dressed in down, praying for snow
I know, I’m strange, too much light makes me nervous
at least in this land where the trees always bear green.
I know something that doesn’t die can’t be beautiful.
Have you ever stood on a frozen lake, California?
The sun above you, the snow & stalled sea — a field of mirror
all demanding to be the sun too, everything around you
is light & it’s gorgeous & if you stay too long it will kill you
& it’s so sad, you know? You’re the only warm thing for miles
& the only thing that can’t shine.

this is my favorite poem of all time. i have the last two lines tattooed on me. i will likely make a whole page dedicated to this poem, the season of spring, and the color green.

By Jill Khoury
After Lucille Clifton and Audre Lorde

[...]

Praise [my body] enchanting, and praise
Her in dullness
Praise her generous
And praise her needy
Praise all her astonishing
Alarms, but mostly

Praise this body
For nothing has killed it yet
Even my own two hands

The great thing about poetry is that it is simply not commodifiable. Materially speaking, it’s worthless in this culture. There’s very, very little money to be made from writing poetry. In that way, it’s subversive since anyone can steal it. Anyone can take it. Anyone can learn it by heart. Anyone can whisper it, can carry it into a jail, through borders, across all sorts of state lines. Poetry is that which can be carried anywhere. It’s invisible. And that makes it very, very precious in a culture where everything has a price.

– Marie Howe, Poet Laureate of New York

by Dalton Day

You are a dragonfly
& I am also a dragonfly.

You & I like to sit
on the long leaves of plants
on humid days, cutting
the green air open
with our sharp blue bodies
simply by being there.

When we move,
it is in quick bursts,
like how someone breathes
when they are trying
to stop crying.

Neither you nor I have ever cried.
We don’t even know about crying.

Every time we see a pond,
it is the first time
we have seen a pond.


Matteo Zanini, Coupling between two dragonflies, 2014