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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

Poetry Off the Shelf: The Uses of Anger

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Audre Lorde: Audre Lorde, February the 23rd, 1977.

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Curtis Fox: This is Poetry Off the Shelf from the Poetry Foundation. I'm Curtis Fox. This week, “The Uses of Anger.” Audre Lorde died in 1992, but she's been quoted and cited so much in recent years that you can't help but think she's still among us. And this self-described Black, lesbian, mother, warrior poet is still very much alive in the culture. She speaks to the issues that are front and center these days: police violence, racism, sexism, homophobia. Lavelle Porter is a writer and scholar of African-American literature. In a piece he wrote for our website about Audre Lorde, he describes the profound effect her poems and prose have had on him. He joins me today to listen and talk about a few of her poems. Lavelle, give us a quick sketch of Audre Lorde, her life and her work. Who was she?

Lavelle Porter: Well, as you mentioned, that description of her pretty much...

Curtis Fox: Sums it up. Black, lesbian…

Lavelle Porter: Sums up her life, yeah. But she was from, a child of the Caribbean, so she was born, her parents were from the Caribbean. And she grew up in Harlem and began to develop an interest in poetry and eventually became someone who was really important in developing lesbian poetry, became involved in the Black Arts Movement, and someone who's really seen as an important figure in 20th century American poetry in general.

Curtis Fox: Am I right to say that she was, during her life, quite marginalized, both as a human being, as a Black lesbian, and as a poet seen on the fringes of literary life?

Lavelle Porter: I think so. I think so. I mean, there were people who were aware of her. And in some poetry circles, you know, she was known. But I feel like her profile's raised over the last several years. One of the catalysts for this piece that I wrote was seeing her name pop up in certain popular culture forums.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. Tell us about the time it popped up in, by a Texas sports broadcaster.

Lavelle Porter: Yeah. So, that was, you know, when the football player Michael Sam was coming out, he gave this very passionate defense of him in a television segment, and he mentioned Audre Lorde. And a lot of people were like, whoa, this guy mentioned Audre Lorde's name…

(BOTH LAUGH)

Lavelle Porter: ...you know, in a context that you really wouldn't expect to hear her.

Curtis Fox: So, this is sportscaster Dale Hansen in 2014.

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Dale Hansen: I'm not always comfortable when a man tells me he's gay. I don't understand his world. But I do understand that he's part of mine. Civil rights activist Audre Lorde said, "It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences." We've always been able to recognize...

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Lavelle Porter: And this was one of several times that her name has come up. Another one that didn't work into the piece was a quote from her featured in the Black romantic comedy, The Best Man. And it actually plays a significant role in the plot of that film. It's great to see that her name is appearing in these sorts of places.

Curtis Fox: So, let's begin with a poem by Audre Lorde. It's one that you write, "helped me [to] locate my own particular Blackness, helped me [to] articulate my [own] feelings that I was marginal within a community that I still found valuable and important." The poem is called “Between Ourselves.” It was recorded by the Library of Congress in 1977. Here's the beginning of it.

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AUDRE LORDE:

Once when I walked into a room
my eyes would seek out the one or two black faces
for contact or reassurance or a sign
I was not alone
now walking into rooms full of black faces
that would destroy me for any difference
where shall my eyes look?
Once it was easy to know who were my people.

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Curtis Fox: So, Lavelle, let me interrupt here. The poet is saying that something has changed in her relationship with other Black people. She was once very comfortable among them, but now something's up. What's up?

Lavelle Porter: Well, you know, if you look at the context of the first four lines, "Once when I walked into a room / my eyes would seek out the one or two black faces / for contact or reassurance or a sign / I was not alone." That's about operating within majority white spaces and seeking out, you know, the one or two Black people, for instance, in the Greenwich Village lesbian spaces that she would go to, right? But this really was born out of her experience at Tougaloo College, which is an historically Black college in my home state of Mississippi, where she taught. And so, there was a different experience teaching in a majority Black institution. And she often found herself confronted with people who were hostile to her because of her lesbian identity and because of her feminist politics. Right?

Curtis Fox: And her lesbian identity was very upfront. She was not shy about proclaiming that she was a lesbian. That was, that's fairly radical in its day. This is the '70s, probably.

Lavelle Porter: Before then.

Curtis Fox: Before then. Even before then.

Lavelle Porter: Yeah, she was there in the late '60s. So, she lived a, you know, pre-Stonewall lesbian life.

Curtis Fox: So, this is about not being comforted by being within a Black community, feeling different. The poem goes on, and I should say that Orishala is from Yoruba mythology. He's the god of whiteness, and he figures in the creation myth.

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Audre Lorde: "[But] if we were stripped to our strength of all pretense / and our flesh was cut away / the sun would bleach all our bones / as white / as the face of my black mother / was bleached white by gold / or Orishala / and how / does that measure me? / I do not believe / our wants have made all our lies / holy."

Curtis Fox: "I do not believe / our wants have made our lies / holy." What is she getting at there?

Lavelle Porter: Well, she's just getting to the idea that, you know, because we are part of an oppressed group, those of us who are marginalized within that group should suppress our individual identities for the sake of the greater good. The fact that we are oppressed doesn't mean that this sort of common identity that we share has to rule over any other differences. And it's often, you know, what has happened, particularly in, like, you know, Black nationalist circles, which was something that she was very interested in.

Curtis Fox: Now, in your essay, you point to this poem as something that really affected you when you first came upon it. How so? Why did it so affect you?

Lavelle Porter: Well, because it articulated this idea of difference, you know, which is a really important concept in her work. It's sort of like, oh, somebody gets, you know, the way that I experience the world. Yeah.

Curtis Fox: Draw that out a little bit. Her idea of difference, what… she writes about it in prose, and she's very explicit about it. What is her idea of difference?

Lavelle Porter: Well, it's the idea that even within specific groups and it's, you know, we're talking about oppressed or marginalized groups, that there are other distinctions. There's this passage in the piece that I quoted from Zami, her biomythography. She talks about, even among Black lesbians, there are, you know, differences within those groups as well. And then one has to confront and deal with those differences instead of pretending that they don't exist. That they don't have to, you know, lead to a rupture with the group, but they have to be dealt with because otherwise you have these, sort of, competing identities that can cause these groups to fracture if you don't acknowledge their difference. And the way to do that is not to, to sort of accept a certain kind of blindness to those differences.

Curtis Fox: So, don't paper it over. Acknowledge them, respect them, and then you can function as a group, perhaps.

Lavelle Porter: Yeah.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. And that, that is unusual. That's an unusual view of difference that's not articulated very often in our culture. I think the opposing view is largely— not opposing view, but another view of difference is that deep down we're all the same.

Lavelle Porter: Right.

Curtis Fox: Right? We're all… (LAUGHS) Basically, we don't have differences deep down when you cut deep enough in a human being. We're all the same.

Lavelle Porter: But that's not how we experience the world. (LAUGHS) We experience the world through, you know, the bodies that we live in. And those are marked as different, and in, particularly as Black people, you know, in this nation in particular.

Curtis Fox: Yeah.

Lavelle Porter: There's a way that we experience the world, and we can't pretend like that doesn't exist.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. Let's go to another poem. This one could have been written yesterday.

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Audre Lorde: This is a poem written out of the experience of the death of a ten-year-old Black boy named Clifford Glover, who was shot down on the streets of Queens by a policeman about three years ago. This policeman was tried for his murder and acquitted.

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Curtis Fox: It's called “Power,” and it begins with a very provocative statement.

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Audre Lorde: "The difference between poetry and rhetoric / is being ready to kill / yourself / instead of your children."

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Curtis Fox: Let me just interrupt the poem before it really gets going. That's a very daring way to begin a poem. What is that statement?

Lavelle Porter: Well, it's a vexing beginning, and I don't think it's, there's any easy answer to it. People have been responding to this poem for years and trying to make sense of the opening line. But, you know, think about it in two parts. "The difference between poetry and rhetoric / is being ready to kill / yourself" poetry "instead of your children" rhetoric. Neither one of those are great (LAUGHS) outcomes. And I think this harkens to the case of Margaret Garner. I don't know if that was a direct influence on this, but it certainly is reminiscent of that. Who was the, an enslaved woman from Kentucky who was taking her four children with her to escape and killed one of them, and was ready to kill all the rest of them and herself…

Curtis Fox: Rather than go back…

Lavelle Porter: ..rather than be captured. That became the inspiration for the character of Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved. And so, it's that sort of idea.

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Audre Lorde:

I am trapped on a desert of raw gunshot wounds
and a dead child dragging his shattered black
face off the edge of my sleep
blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders
is the only liquid for miles
and my stomach
churns at the imagined taste while
my mouth splits into dry lips
without loyalty or reason
thirsting for the wetness of his blood
as it sinks into the whiteness
of this desert where I am lost
without imagery or magic
trying to make power out of hatred and destruction
trying to heal my dying son with kisses
only the sun will bleach his bones quicker.

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Curtis Fox: So, the poet, Lavelle, seems to be having some kind of nightmare where she is the mother of this child who has been shot and is dying, or is already dead. Am I right about that? It seems to be a kind of a vision, a nightmare.

Lavelle Porter: It is. I mean, it's very morbid imagery in that section. The image of the desert is significant. You know, I learned from reading Alexis De Veaux's biography that it was Audre Lorde's trip to Africa, and she spent time there, by the way, living in Ghana, but visited other places. And her, you know, traveling over the Sahara kind of had a profound influence on her consciousness. And so, you see that imagery show up in her poems. Just the vastness of it and the futility of life within it kind of struck her as a powerful image to use.

Curtis Fox: And the key line seems to me in this bit was she is "trying to make power out of hatred and destruction.” That's the central struggle in this poem. Something terrible has happened. She's feeling absolutely awful about it, and she's trying to make power out of it. It's interesting. Not love, power. And then...

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Audre Lorde:

A policeman who shot down a ten year old in Queens
stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood
and a voice said 'Die you little motherfucker' and
there are tapes to prove it. [In] his trial
this policeman said in his own defense
'I didn't notice the size or nothing else
only the color'. And
there are tapes to prove that too.
Today that 37 year old white man
with 13 years of police forcing
was set free
by eleven white men who said they were satisfied
justice had been done
and one Black Woman who said
'They convinced me' meaning
they had dragged her 4'10" black Woman's frame
over the hot coals
of four centuries of white male approval
until she let go
the first real power she ever had
and lined her own womb with cement
to make a graveyard for our children.

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Curtis Fox: Wow. That's a powerful thing. That's one Black woman on the jury. And it's interesting how Audre Lorde sees 400 years of history bearing down on her.

Lavelle Porter: Yeah.

Curtis Fox: What do you make of that section?

Lavelle Porter: Well, it's the, you know, history of the justice system, or injustice system, in this country that is in control. So, when you're talking about white supremacy, you're not just talking about attitudes. You're talking about, you know, structural and institutional inequalities. And when you look at the justice system throughout the United States, controlled at every level by people who are not only white, but who are white supremacist, who freely, you know, admit to this idea that they believe that, you know, white people should rule. It's… you know, how are you going to find justice in those courts of law?

Curtis Fox: And it overwhelms the one Black woman on the jury who can't stand up, who has missed this opportunity for justice, according to Audre Lorde, sympathetically. She's very sympathetic with the woman, but she also says she's ruined it for generations to come.

Lavelle Porter: Well, what could she do? I mean, you know, what could she do in that situation?

Curtis Fox: Yeah. So, now we come back to the poet and her internal struggle when faced with these brutal realities.

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Audre Lorde:

I have not been able to touch the destruction
within me.
But unless I learn to use
the difference between poetry and rhetoric
my power too will run corrupt as poisonous mold
or lie limp and useless as an unconnected wire
and one day I will take my teenaged plug
and connect it to the nearest socket
raping an 85 year old white woman
who is somebody's mother
and as I beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed
a greek chorus will be singing in 3/4 time
'Poor thing. She never hurt a soul. What beasts they are.'

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Curtis Fox: So, Lavelle, this poem ends with a fantasy of violence against an old white woman. What are we to make of that?

Lavelle Porter: It's a poem that expresses how anger and frustration can fester inside of us and how any retaliation will only serve to affirm the dubious opinions about us. And it can lead us to cause us to seek out someone innocent to enact that vengeance upon. And it speaks to a topic that she explored in other places, particularly her essay, “The Uses of Anger.” And, you know, she really explores anger as a meaningful emotion, one that shouldn't be suppressed, but that has to be dealt with and channelled into some kind of constructive way, unless it leads to something destructive.

Curtis Fox: I can think of other poems, like by Amiri Baraka, that have a similar kind of energy and anger to them. And he's laying it out there. He's not saying, let's just all hold hands and pretend it's not happening. It's an expression of anger.

Lavelle Porter: Yeah. And actually, from the essay “The Uses of Anger,” she actually has this quote, and I think it appropriate to this poem. She says, quote, "It is not the anger of other women that will destroy us, but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, to move beyond the manner of presentation to the substance, to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment." And I think that's what she's trying to express in this poem. And seeing sort of what can go wrong with that kind of anger. It's a dangerous force, but it's one that we have to learn to channel.

Curtis Fox: Yeah. And it's also, she's not saying that a poem is a vehicle for simple morality, a poem is a vehicle for emotion. And to portray it and to embody emotion and words in a way that we can all relate to.

Lavelle Porter: Yeah, it's the kind of poem, there's no easy morality to get from it. You know, it's a poem that really leaves you uneasy. And that's, I think, what makes it so powerful.

Curtis Fox: Lavelle, thanks so much.

Lavelle Porter: Thank you.

Curtis Fox: Lavelle Porter's essay on Audre Lorde is up on our website. Let us know what you think of this podcast. Email us at [email protected]. The theme music for this program comes from the Claudia Quintet. For Poetry Off the Shelf, I'm Curtis Fox. Thanks for listening.