ABlog

I feel tremendously honored to have been included on this panel and in this celebration; I want to thank Nagueyalti Warren for the invitation and extend my congratulations to everyone who has been part of fostering this amazing phenomenon, Cave Canem, which has grown from a kitchen table operation to be such a powerful presence on the U.S. poetry scene. For me as a white poet who seeks to connect lyricism and artistic play with urgent historical and political realities, the fact of Cave Canem means I feel less alone in a landscape so meticulously arranged to deny those connections.

There’s a sense in which my entire life in poetry has been about “the poetics of gender,” which initially made it hard to find a focus for my remarks. Then I thought of the many ways in which my take on those poetics was formed by the example of women poets of color who identified as lesbians, feminists, and/or “womanists” in the gender-activist movements of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. “Struggle is a school,” the saying goes—and, while the multi-racial lesbian-feminist circles that I moved in in the Brooklyn and Manhattan of those years were hardly a radical utopia, they were a space for tremendous creative ferment, rich with new articulations of how race, gender, class, sexuality interweave in personal experience and the reproduction of social hierarchies. Needless to say, the absolutely essential decentering of whiteness that accompanied this ferment was not something most of us white feminists exactly embraced with open arms: a lot of us wanted the badge of being “the oppressed,” pure and simple, and even those who “got it” on a theoretical level had a lot of conditioning to overcome, with varying degrees of success.

But all that is a story for another day; what I want to focus on here is the tremendous energy of imagination, feeling, insight, and craft that this “movement of poets,” led by women of color, brought to the interrogation of a gendered power imbalance, in the process generating precious glimpses of possible future freedom. Three key poets who for me emblematize this dynamically gendered, racially explicit, class-conscious, linguistically insurgent poetics are June Jordan, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Audre Lorde, all three of whom we’ve lost, in the physical sense anyway, at tragically young ages. I would have liked to speak about the work of all three, but since time is short, I’m going to focus on Audre Lorde, specifically on one stunning poem whose enactment of a gendered poetics seems to me indicative of the many opportunities and challenges facing all poets who aspire to create from within what Lorde called “the House of Difference.” That poem is “Power,” from The Black Unicorn.

This poem has been taking the top of my head off at least since 1975, when I encountered it in the early lesbian anthology Amazon Poetry. At that time, I understood it primarily as an outcry against racism; I subscribed to the correct but limited understanding that racism is a lesbian and feminist issue because women of color cannot and do not wish to separate themselves from the totality of their beleaguered communities, including racially targeted men. It’s only in subsequent years, as I’ve read further and further into the layers of the poem and Lorde’s other work, that its harrowing brilliance as a vision and critique of gendered experience itself has come home to me. This is a poem in which the speaker, by her self-scrutiny, requires of each of us that we in turn interrogate our own position in the hierarchies of gendered, racialized violence that shape our contemporary world and its dubious prospects for survival.

[reads poem "Power."]

The single word of the poem’s title was a hugely important one for Lorde; it looms large, for instance, in her germinal 1982 essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in which she declares: “The woman’s place of power within each of us is neither white nor surface; it is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep.” The poem’s opening lines, however, introduce a doubt about what sort of power the title refers to: is it the “power” of poetry or the “power” of rhetoric? I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I’d been reading this poem for a number of years before I found out that its opening alludes to a super-famous quote from white poet-father W.B. Yeats: “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” [1917] I heard instead simply a rebuke to macho “radical” speechifying, particularly given the line break after “kill,” which allows the reader to expect an exhortation to heroic, violent action, only to meet with the hidous choice: kill yourself or kill your children. Finally grasping the Yeats reference let me see that Lorde is simultaneously throwing down the gauntlet to the European canon by reframing Yeats’s calm, even academic-sounding genre distinction as a high-stakes moment in the bleeding, suffering social and political world. Brilliantly, in just five lines, Lorde takes on both the white European canon and its seeming antithesis, the militant stance of male radicals including those in the Black Power movement.

In the second stanza, Lorde moves into the personal voice, the “I” that offers a striking contrast to the conventionally authoritative voice of the first stanza, which had mimicked Yeats’s magisterial tone if not his content. By the end of the stanza, after we’ve moved through the horrendous dream image of the speaker tempted to drink the black child’s blood in the whiteness of the desert, this “I” is speaking from one of Lorde’s most characteristic stances—as a Black mother: “trying to heal my dying son with kisses.” She reveals herself in the most vulnerable of positions: not the disembodied intellectual who sums up the difference between literary approaches, but the desperate, isolated individual confronted with an impossible choice, and defined by her body’s responses.

The third stanza moves from dream to documentary, and introduces the figure of an actual white man, the policeman who says “die, you little motherfucker” after he shoots the child—Clifford Glover, a real African-American ten year old who was shot from behind by Officer Thomas Shea in 1973; Shea was acquitted after the jury trial described in the poem, and Lorde’s biographer, Alexis DeVeaux, reveals that Lorde actually began writing the poem in her car which she pulled off the highway to scribble her reactions after the news of the acquittal came on the radio. The expression “motherfucker” is not simply a vicious epithet expressing the murderer’s contempt for this black child, but a fantasy of gendered violence made horrendously concrete in the poem’s last stanza: “raping an 85-year-old white woman/who is somebody’s mother.” The percussive rhythms of the policeman’s rhetoric morph into the hideously lulling rhythms of the conventional phrases that will in turn justify further murders of black children: “poor thing, she never hurt a soul, what beasts they are.”

I am struck by the juxtaposition of mother-images in this poem: that of the speaker, whose “son” the murdered child figuratively is; that of the one Black woman on the jury who was “convinced” by the “satisfied” white men; and that of the imagined/predicted white victim of the rape and murder, acts strikingly mediated by the speaker, herself a mother who will “[connect] my teenaged plug” to a socket (suggesting both the turning on of a random or misplaced current of power and a literal penetration). The poem’s speaker almost mercilessly interrogates images of motherhood and the inhuman responsibilities that attach to the Black mother’s role. “lined her womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children” refuses to excuse the black jury member’s act simply on grounds of her very real and terrifying oppression, while “an 85-year-old white woman who was somebody’s mother” interrogates a racist society’s sentimentality about motherhood (read: white motherhood) and the images of “innocent,” violated white women intrinsic to white supremacy. But above all, it is the urgent and impossible dilemma faced by the mother-speaker: to kill self or children, to perform a saintly miracle (that does not exist) or to become a vampire--to “touch the destruction within me” or hand it down as another spiral in the cycle of “hatred and destruction”—that constitutes the poem’s picture of conscious Black motherhood as representative humanity. The poet-speaker claims her task as nothing other than the reconstitution of power from its popular association with “male violence”—the bloody violence of the cop, the smug, legalistic violence of the “satisfied” white male jury, the inevitable reactive violence of Black boys who have been labeled “motherfuckers,” or even the self-serving postures of some militant Black leaders—into a force that could give “our children” a future. It implicitly calls on us to share the speaker’s dilemma: how do I touch the destruction within me? How do I make power out of hatred? What will I do for our children?

I’m struck by the way in which this poem not only “talks back” to variously racialized notions of male authority and power, but rebukes the often complacent white feminist rhetoric of the period in which it was written. During those years, many white radical feminists argued for an essentially “nurturant,” non-violent quality within all women, a notion built on older traditions of white women’s pacifism. Lorde’s poem takes full responsibility for women’s involvement in apparently “male” acts of violence. The poem exposes rape as, fundamentally, an act of war, but positions “the destruction within me” as an active force, certainly not the initial source but the relay point for destructive energy: I will take my teenaged plug, I will “beat her senseless and set a torch to her bed.” This shocking agency, ironically contrasted with the sentimental platitudes of the greek chorus, is what we take away as a dreadful prophecy that almost seems actualized by the force and vividness of the speaker’s language. At the end of the poem, everything is contradiction: European forms (the “greek” tragedy, the “3/4 time,” i.e. a waltz) are all jumbled up; the chorus gets the last word but it speaks only in reifying platitudes and its measure is certainly not that of a waltz, though it is equally romanticized and lulling.

While I think it would be a distortion to call “Power” a transgendered poem, I do want to close by inviting us to read it back through the lens of questions that the contemporary transgender movement has posed, and that I believe need to figure into any discussion of a gendered poetics. At its most radical, this movement asks all of us to confront our sense of “ownership” of gender, our sense of the he/she distinction itself as something we can be sure of, even as we may long to revise standing definitions of what it means to be a man or a woman. This, it seems to me, presents a hugely important challenge to those of us who want to embrace a poetics that consciously interrogates gender rather than unconsciously reproducing its racialized hierarchies. Thus we might ask: how do we know--do we really know-- that the speaker of “Power” is female? That speaker says “my son,” but not “I am a mother,” though “heal my dying son with kisses” is a Pieta image, and the parallel with the symbolic failed motherhood of the only black woman on the jury is clear. The intentional fallacy whispers in my ear: the speaker is female because that is how Audre Lorde thought at the time: she always spoke from a female position. And yet it might be important to remember that Clifford Glover was with his father when he was killed, as both of them ran away in terror from the menacing police. We might want to ask, then, what would a world look like in which it would seem just as likely for a father as a mother to claim as a central part of his/her identity the anguished tenderness and overwhelming sense of responsibility evinced by the speaker of this poem?

In “Power,” Audre Lorde speaks in many voices, trying on the cadences of white European poetic authority, taking responsibility for so-called “male” violence, and perhaps reading her own maternal feelings through the anguish of fathers. In “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” she tells us that poetry and dreaming share an ability to acculturate us to ideas that would automatically be rejected as too foreign or unsettling if first introduced within a purely rational framework. So I’m sure that she would have grappled in brave and startling ways with the ultimate gender question—what is gender, after all, are there really only two? Why divide our world in this way?--she who reveled so in her Black womanhood, yet who wrote in Zami, the work she styled a “biomythography”: “I have always wanted to be both man and woman. I would like to enter a woman the way any man can, and to be entered—to leave and to be left—to be hot and hard and soft all at the same time in the course of our loving.”