Lorde and Brooks: Poetry and Its Radical Emotion Olinka Regules Verduzco College

Audre Lorde’s 1985 essay Poetry is Not a Luxury makes several arguments about the purpose and power of poetry, particularly for marginalized groups like women and people of color. Her explanation of how poetry serves us—as a tool to turn radical emotions into rational and liberating ideas—is mirrored in Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1967 poem Boy Breaking Glass. Brooks’ poem about oppression within the African American community is heavily riddled with intense emotion, emotion that the poet focuses in the images and themes of the poem to reveal a rational idea about equality. In this way, Brooks’ poem shows that poetry can “give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless” (Lorde).

Both Brooks and Lorde view emotion, and the poetry that comes out of it, as a way of resisting oppressive norms. Throughout her essay, Lorde speaks about “the white fathers” who try to suppress the emotions of black women. When black women become more in touch with their “ancient, black, non-European view of living . . . [they] learn more and more to cherish [their] own feelings” (Lorde). Lorde explains that emotion and poetry “forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first...