Dead Poets, continued

Many thanks to Art Bar Reading Series and David Clink for the 2014 Dead Poets Society Night. In response to many questions I post the sources for my Audre Lorde readings.

From Lorde’s last collection, The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance: Poems 1987–1992, I read “Speechless” and “Change.”

I synthesized versions of the following statement she repeated numerous times in The Cancer Journals: “Once I accept the existence of dying, as a life process, who can ever have power over me again?” and “Maybe this is the chance to live and speak those things I really do believe, that power comes from moving into whatever I fear most that cannot be avoided. But will I ever be strong enough again to open my mouth and not have a cry of raw pain leap out?”

And I read what I call Audre Lorde’s I-can’t-breathe poem, “Power,” published in 1978 in The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde and available online from poetryfoundation.org.

Sadly, too little has changed, Audre. We still can’t breathe…

Comments are closed.