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Lisa L.
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Audre Lorde's Sonnet Primal Scene
In the 1995 documentary Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, the revolutionary poet seems to surprise the interviewer in claiming a very traditional verse form, the sonnet, as an artistic origin point. Lorde recounts:
I learned about sonnets by reading Edna St. Vincent Millay’s love sonnets and loving them and deciding I was going to try...I was editor of my high school magazine and I wrote a poem about love. And…the faculty advisor said it was a bad sonnet. And I really knew that it was a good one. But I knew that she didn’t like it because of the things that I said in it. So I sent it off to Seventeen magazine and they bought it. And I made more money from that one poem than I made for the next ten years.[i]
Audre Lorde’s sonnet origin story is a unique vantage point from whic to explore the contested role of the sonnet in African American literature. I want to re-introduce Lorde, usually associated with the directly political and confessional open forms of second-wave feminist poetry and the vernacular and experimental styles of the Black Arts Movement, as an important figure in the history of the sonnet. And I want to contribute to the shockingly slender body of criticism on the poetry of a writer most often read as an icon of black feminist theory, but who first and foremost identified as a poet. Although Lorde’s poems are “widely anthologized, honored by numerous awards, and praised by contemporary poets,” they have “received little critical attention.”[ii] In taking Lorde’s perhaps unexpected interest in the sonnet seriously, I hope to respond to Elizabeth Alexander’s “call for a look to the insides of archives and bodies of work themselves in their original contexts” when reading Black poetry; Alexander cautions us against reading them “just as we receive them in anthologies that operate with the hard-to-avoid periodizing, tidying-up impulses of the presents in which they are made.”[iii] The story of the appearance of Lorde’s sonnet is untidy because it brings together African American modernisms, Anglo-American verse traditions, queer, feminized and abjected poetic forms, and black feminist critiques of both white and black masculinist literary traditions, in often uncomfortable ways. But Lorde’s first publication is a poem that I do not want to see lost to history, or dismissed as juvenilia. Alexander reminds us: “it is testimony, or the text itself, that takes us inside the black interior, a moment, a movement.” Lorde’s early sonnet takes us inside the black interior of the modern sonnet, its revision, rejection, and revival, and shows us the importance of black women poets to the reinvention and relevance of the form.
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[i] Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson, dirs., A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde. Premier: June 18, 1996, PBS. 60 min.
[ii] As Lexi Rudnitsky notes in Callaloo. An excellent essay on Lorde’s poetics also appeared in Callaloo: Keith Leonard, “Which Me Will Survive; Reclaiming Identity, Rethinking Audre Lorde” (35: 3, Summer 2012), pp. 758-777.
[iii] The Black Interior, 88.
I learned about sonnets by reading Edna St. Vincent Millay’s love sonnets and loving them and deciding I was going to try...I was editor of my high school magazine and I wrote a poem about love. And…the faculty advisor said it was a bad sonnet. And I really knew that it was a good one. But I knew that she didn’t like it because of the things that I said in it. So I sent it off to Seventeen magazine and they bought it. And I made more money from that one poem than I made for the next ten years.[i]
Audre Lorde’s sonnet origin story is a unique vantage point from whic to explore the contested role of the sonnet in African American literature. I want to re-introduce Lorde, usually associated with the directly political and confessional open forms of second-wave feminist poetry and the vernacular and experimental styles of the Black Arts Movement, as an important figure in the history of the sonnet. And I want to contribute to the shockingly slender body of criticism on the poetry of a writer most often read as an icon of black feminist theory, but who first and foremost identified as a poet. Although Lorde’s poems are “widely anthologized, honored by numerous awards, and praised by contemporary poets,” they have “received little critical attention.”[ii] In taking Lorde’s perhaps unexpected interest in the sonnet seriously, I hope to respond to Elizabeth Alexander’s “call for a look to the insides of archives and bodies of work themselves in their original contexts” when reading Black poetry; Alexander cautions us against reading them “just as we receive them in anthologies that operate with the hard-to-avoid periodizing, tidying-up impulses of the presents in which they are made.”[iii] The story of the appearance of Lorde’s sonnet is untidy because it brings together African American modernisms, Anglo-American verse traditions, queer, feminized and abjected poetic forms, and black feminist critiques of both white and black masculinist literary traditions, in often uncomfortable ways. But Lorde’s first publication is a poem that I do not want to see lost to history, or dismissed as juvenilia. Alexander reminds us: “it is testimony, or the text itself, that takes us inside the black interior, a moment, a movement.” Lorde’s early sonnet takes us inside the black interior of the modern sonnet, its revision, rejection, and revival, and shows us the importance of black women poets to the reinvention and relevance of the form.
____
[i] Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson, dirs., A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde. Premier: June 18, 1996, PBS. 60 min.
[ii] As Lexi Rudnitsky notes in Callaloo. An excellent essay on Lorde’s poetics also appeared in Callaloo: Keith Leonard, “Which Me Will Survive; Reclaiming Identity, Rethinking Audre Lorde” (35: 3, Summer 2012), pp. 758-777.
[iii] The Black Interior, 88.
Lisa L. Moore is the author, most recently, of the Lambda-winning Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes and the poetry chapbook 24 Hours of Men. An essay from her current project, “A Lesbian History of the Sonnet,” appeared in Critical Inquiry. She is Archibald A. Hill Professor of English, Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and Director of the Program in LGBTQ Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.