Prewriting

For my second Essay, I am choosing to write about Lorde’s poem “Power.” I feel her work is extremely profound especially with today’s current events. I am going to discuss the racial tensions occurring throughout the poem as well as society during the era in which it was written. I will also discuss the carelessness of the death of a young child still holding on to innocence and the relevance within Lorde’s era as well as our own. 

Read More »

Power: Rhetoric and Poetry

To express oneself is the greatest form of freedom. To question oneself is the worst. Poetry depicts our rawest emotions buried deep within the bosom of the soul. It frees the mind as the lead of the steady hand releases the anguish intertwined within the beating heart; swirling through the ever flowing veins of crimson. Audre Lorde depicts the foreshadow of events to come. The twelfth jury member, a woman of African descent, “lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children”(Lorde3373). Lorde also makes reference to “being ready to kill yourself instead of your children”(Lorde3372). The single African American woman gave up her voice and smothered herself within the burning coals of oppression. When a mother dies, whether metaphorically or physically, she cannot protect her kin. In giving up her voice, the woman allowed the murderer of a young boy to be set free on the streets with a gun in hand and the power to subjugate the the minority. Her only question was the rhetoric of was he guilty? It’s one thing to succumb to the persecutor, but yet another to give one’s self up in such a way that delivery of an innocent child to enemy is the outcome. 

The introduction sets the pace of the poetic stand. Lorde purposefully brings forth the idea of death instantaneously as she wants the reader to distinguish the difference between “murder” and the real death of a child. Murder is heard in all eras throughout history, yet death, finality, makes it real. It allows the reader to feel. Do you feel Lorde’s depiction is appropriate for the message of “Power?” Does the difference between poetry and rhetoric hold relevance in “Power?”

Read More »

Some Women Wait

This poem said a lot to me, the poet begins by inferring or better yet stating that "some women love to wait" (3375). Lorde then starts to list the things women "love" to wait for, some things that shouldn't be waited for like someone else to make them whole again, somethings that you're expected to wait for like a marriage proposal. She talks about waiting, or not living isn't always worth it. That "the opposite of living is only not living and the stars do not care" (3376). What you chose to make up your life is your decision. To wait for change or to change yourselves as in the ending of the poem (3376). But the poet doesn't say whether this decision for changing oneself is for the good or the bad. And I don't think these stations of waiting are necessarily bad, they seem to be. It seems to be that these women she describes are putting their lives on hold or holding back from something. Women wait for such tremendous things, things that just take time. Waiting isn't an awful thing, waiting for a husbands return is an empowering and independent time in my life, waiting for the birth of a child is huge for a mother. The growth, development, all the stages for becoming a mother. This waiting is important to the process. I think Lorde lightly touches these times but I don't know it just didn't feel right to me. The beginning of the poem reflects the rest of the poem for me in that she believes some of these women love the waiting, that's certainly not true. Depsite the waiting being a necessity these women don't love it. I thought the desciption of Audre Lorde as being a black lesbian feminist warrior poet empowering, I'm not one for lables. And this was riddled with them because I feel like it can give you a negative impression of somebody. Just like this poem felt like a label, the patient women, always waiting for a life that doesn't come. Waiting for love, waiting for a baby, waiting for acceptance, equality, waiting for all these things and her patience is her down fall because she will wait until eventually she gives up her waiting and accepts defeat, changing herself in the end. Maybe I missed the point of this poem, I don't know. But I see strenght in waiting, I see perseverance, I see some wonderful things and I'd hate such a negative lable to be placed on diligent women waiting for something important to them. 

Read More »

Power

Audre Lorde's poem, "Power," is quite an incredible piece. Detailing the killing of a ten year old black child, Lorde creates a nightmarish landscape. "I am trapped in a desert of raw gunshot wounds," Lorde writes, setting the scene as she continues: "a dead child dragging his shattered black/face off the edge of my sleep" (3372). The opening two stanzas are so full of this raw, powerful energy, that really seem to make obvious how tragically Lorde feels for this child. In the little bio on Lorde, it mentions "Lorde insisted that she wrote to fulfill her responsibility 'to speak the truth as [she felt] it" (3372). What it does not mention, however, is just how incredibly vivid her words are. The scene she creates is so wicked, so vile, and yet, not so hard to believe. The beginning line had me thinking a lot about what exactly Lorde means; "The difference between poetry and rhetoric/ is being/ready to kill/yourself/instead of your children" (3372). Poetry is expression, pure emotion transferred to a page, as where rhetoric is being being persuasive, usually without any compassion or sincerity. I suppose she means, poetry is giving every piece of yourself for another; a poet tends to be very in touch with their emotions, as well as others, and they live for a more picturesque world, one of love. As to where rhetoric is the complete opposite, it seems to add a sense of selfishness. Where Lorde is a poet, the cop might be a rhetoric, willing to murder a child and then defend himself, with no remorse for his actions or the loss of life suffered.

Overall, this poem left me speechless. I read it over and over again, each time focusing more on a different stanza, jaw half dropping, because it felt like I could see it. I felt like I could have been there, at the scene, in the court room; Lorde makes it all feel so real. And all the while, I sympathize with her, as we all get upset when these things happen. Justice is rarely served. But one thing Lorde does realize, is even though we can necessarily obtain justice, we can remember these people through our expression.

Read More »

Angry woman

Audre Lorde is the original angry black women.  In the poem, “Power” she could be talking about the situation in Ferguson.  She talks about how a policemen shot a child down and shouted at him “Die you little motherfucker. (Lorde 24)   She is convinced that justice was not served. She writes about coercing a small black woman to vote with the rest of the white male jurors. Her words are violent and extreme. “and lined her own womb with cement to make a graveyard for our children” (Lorde 37-38). I think Lorde demonstrates her feminism in the poem “Stations.”  See writes of women waiting for another person to fulfill their dreams and not be an agent of change in their own lives.  Until the last line of the poem, “Some women wait for something to change and nothing does change so they change themselves.”(Lorde 41-45). All of Lorde’s poems in this week’s presentation are intense and not pleasant, light reading. She evokes powerful feelings of racial injustices and women’s issues of inequality.

Read More »