A Litany for Survival

In the 1960s and 1970s, Audre Lorde was a notable figure in LGBTQ+ and Black Marxist communities. According to The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Lorde was “among the most significant poets articulating the intersections of feminism and race, in both her poetry and nonfictional writing” (Greene, Roland, et al. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton University Press, 2012, p. 482). Lorde was dedicated to creating space for Black women in the feminist movement, which was predominately white. She was part of the Combahee River Collective and her literary community included Black women, such as Michele Wallace, and other radical leftist lesbians, such as Adrienne Rich. The Combahee River Collective created a National Black Feminist Organization in response to the whiteness of the upper-class feminist movement.

Lorde and her contemporaries believed that personal is political and wrote from personal experience, rejecting the Modernist poetic ideal of the universal experience. Furthermore, Lorde tended to write concisely in free-verse. She argued that poetry’s brevity makes it accessible to marginalized people. The Princeton Encyclopedia includes her famous quote: “of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical. It is…the one which can be done between shifts, in the hospital pantry, on the subway, and on scraps of surplus paper” (Greene 294).