... 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 horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.
Interpretation
Poetry is essential for expressing our hopes and experiences, shaping our understanding of life.
In this quote, Audre Lorde emphasizes the fundamental role of poetry in our lives, asserting that it is not merely an artistic luxury but a crucial element of human existence. She explains that poetry helps us articulate our innermost thoughts and emotions, transforming abstract ideas into language that can inspire action and foster understanding. By naming the nameless, poetry enables us to navigate our experiences, giving voice to our fears, aspirations, and the complex realities of life.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of the arts in education, this quote can highlight how poetry enriches our lives.
The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.
There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.
I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
Real people speak in my books about the main events of the age, such as the war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire.
My feeling is that poetry will wither on the vine if you don't regularly come back to the simplest fundamentals of the poem: rhythm, rhyme, simple subjects - love, death, war.
Those people who recognise that imagination is reality's master, we call sages, and those who act upon it, we call artists.
When I'm writing a new play, there's a period where I know I shouldn't be out in public much. I imagine most people who create go through something like this. You willfully loosen some of the inner straps that hold your core together.
As for me, I am a watercolor. I wash off.
Life is more important than art; that's what makes art important.
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