“a small book shaped like another me”: Audre Lorde

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that there would be many, many, many references to fire (and burning and flames) in a poetry collection titled Coal, and anyone reading Audre Lorde’s marvelous book should be ready to be scorched by the white hot flame of truth

Lorde’s title poem is rich with meaning as she comments on race and love and poetry and more. In “Coal” she tells her readers:

There are many kinds of open.
How a diamond comes into a knot of flame
How a sound comes into a word, coloured
By who pays what for speaking.

Words are important, as one would expect of a gifted poet, and Lorde uses hers to speak of passion and despair, hope and horror, anxiety and strength. These multitudes are all within her, and she would suggest within us, and she gives voice to them as she writes:

Some words live in my throat
Breeding like adders. Others know sun
Seeking like gypsies over my tongue
To explode through my lips
Like young sparrows bursting from shell.
Some words
Bedevil me.

Bedeviled, but undaunted, Lorde continues with verse that paints pictures both fantastic and sometimes threatening, as in “Summer Oracle” where she writes: “[I] imagine you into fire / untouchable in a magician’s cloak / covered with signs of destruction and birth / sewn with griffins and arrows and hammers…” So much fire, here and in many of the poems in this collection. 

And that fire serves a purpose, or many purposes. It burns away pain, it leaves a literary landscape barren but ready for new growth, it flares up in ways that burn into our collective memory, as in “Gemini” when she tells us: “the night was dark / and love was a burning fence about my house.”

Love in its many forms burns throughout this collection, both romantic love (in the passionate and intimate “On a Night of the Full Moon”) and maternal love (in “What My Child Learns of the Sea” and a host of other poems in the second section of the book) are given voice, and late in the collection one full section is devoted to the heartrending experience of sitting with a struggling friend in the hospital. Throughout it all, Lorde never shies away from the pain that is a part of life, acknowledging that “the road to nowhere / is slippery with our blood”.

That notion of struggle and pain colors much of Lorde’s verse and manifests in a type of predictive despair in “When the Saints Come Marching In” where she writes: 

Plentiful sacrifice and believers in redemption
are all that is needed
so any day now I expect
some new religion
to rise up like tear gas
from the streets of New York
erupting like the rank pavement smell
released by a garbage truck’s
baptismal drizzle.

HIgh priests are ready and waiting
their incense pans full of fire

I do not know their rituals
nor what name of the god
the survivors will worship
I only know she will be terrible
and very busy
and very old.

That bleakness, written in the 1970s, might be echoed by folks living and writing today. It is underscored by Lorde’s idea that being a parent amplifies the sentiment: “Now we’ve made a child. / and the dire predictions / have changed into wild / grim / speculations”. But that’s not the end of the story. She continues, in “And What About the Children” with the idea that as long as her “son’s head is on straight” he won’t care about what doesn’t matter, but will see a greater truth in the world.

Lorde’s poetry is beautiful and powerful and uncompromising. Unafraid to face the world at its worst, she uses her voice to make from those challenges something magical. As she says in “Paperweight”: “All the poems I have ever written / make a small book shaped like another me”.

Coal? Fire.

Finishing this Year of Poetry next week with Floyd Skloot’s Selected Poems 1970-2005