The Brooklyn Rail

It means something particular to write and read poetry in times like these. That particularity has to do with poetic diction, which is the opposite of the cant of fascism. Where power seeks to order reality by controlling language, poetry offers a different and higher precision. Poetry makes a refuge in words, which is why Audre Lorde spoke of it as a means of survival—though poetry is not usually listed among life’s essentials. One can live without it. Or can one? The labor poetry demands is not compulsory, but without it, you may never chisel away the stone from the silhouette of your truest profile. Poetry finds you where you strive to hide. It is the secret sharer, across languages and centuries, of your own most otherness.

Lorde’s essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” was directed toward women, contrasting a womanist inheritance of language with the tradition of the “white fathers.” When I read Sister Outsider in college, I feared I might be eavesdropping. I was not its intended audience. I was besotted with poets—Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop—but missed Lorde’s message: that writing poetry, not just reading it, becomes the quality of light through which we perceive life. The fear that writing was indulgent—especially because I revered canonical poets—became a block. Had I understood Lorde’s address to women as also addressing me, I might have overcome it sooner.

I have been thinking about artificial intelligence, another toxic gift from the “white fathers” of Silicon Valley. One position in the AI debate views writing as quintessentially human, horrified that students might sidestep literacy with a button press. Another notes AI’s uncanny ability to mimic poetic form. What reconciles these, for me, is recognizing that something artificial or impersonal lies at the root of all writing. The most confessional poet quilts her subject from truth and lies. “Language is fossil poetry,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the white fathers I still find time for, because he knew that inheritance requires transformation.

It is the accelerating speed of machinized language that I dread, not the use of devices, algorithms, or chance operations. An algorithm is just a recipe, and what is poetic form but a recipe? The point is slow, careful cooking and sharing. Lorde’s poetry stunned me when I finally turned to it. Here was another Plath, another Bishop, another Ginsberg—an American voice worthy of deep study. The immediacy of her essays struck me three decades ago—“your silence will not protect you” still rings in my ears—but the slow burn of her poetry reminds me that language must be assimilated at different tempos.

Why is poetry still not a luxury? Today, a broad coalition of people across race, gender, and class must cultivate presence and autonomy of heart and mind against coercive patriarchy. Recent months have brought a great leap backward I never anticipated. Yet poets are at the forefront of protest and defense. Poetry’s power to strike like lightning or wear down our defenses like water on stone will sustain us through this urgent, ongoing work—a work that, gladly, has neither end date nor guarantee.