skeleton architecture

And where that language does not yet exist, it is our poetry which helps to fashion it. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before

—Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not A Luxury” (1977)

living use

Art is not living. It is a use of living. The artist has the ability to take that living and use it in a certain way, and produce art.

—Audre Lorde, “My Words Will Be There,” I am your sister: collected and unpublished writings of Audre Lorde (Oxford Univ. Press, 2009)

not luxury

I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean—in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight.

For women, then, 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.

—Audre Lorde, “Mapping,” Lofty Dogmas (U. of Arkansas Press, 2005), edited by Deborah Brown, Annie Finch and Maxim Kumin