Women Academics From The United States

"I know Not these my hands And yet I think there was A woman like me once had hands Like these."

"Listen. With faint dry sound, Like steps of passing ghosts, The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees And fall."

"These be Three silent things: The falling snow...the hour Before the dawn...the mouth of one Just dead."

"The old Old winds that blew When chaos was, what do They tell the clattered trees that I Should weep?"

"My object to venture the suggestion that an important application of phonetics to metrical problems lies in the study of phonetic word-structure."

"When I read Jefferson's disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is...When Audre Lorde fractured this language and then built us a new one, giving us a fresh way to make sense of who we are in the world, it was an act of love."

"Over many years (I am almost 72) so many poets have touched my imagination and opened paths for me—it hardly makes sense to list them. I have always read a great deal of poetry. Some poets—like Robert Lowell, Denise Levertov, Randall Jarrell, Jean Valentine, Audre Lorde, Hayden Carruth, Jane Cooper, June Jordan, Joy Harjo, Clayton Eshelman—have been my friends, we’ve been comrades in exchanging work and encouraging each other"

"One of the most sensual and sensuous women poets I can think of is Audre Lorde. She thinks in images that are most certainly lesbian images. But also images from Afro-Caribbean culture and from African mythology and experience. And that's a very powerful combination. Because that also has not been available in most poetry in English."

"It is my conviction that currently in the United States, more women than men are writing good and vital poetry, although there are fine male poets. This is our renaissance, our Elizabethan plenty. We have giants like Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Diane di Prima and Maxine Kumin, we have rising powers like Joy Harjo and Celia Gilbert and Sharon Olds, and we have dozens and dozens of individual voices sharply flavored and yet of our time, our flesh, our troubles."

"In a uniquely distinct way, Audre Lorde's and Toni Cade Bambara's presence in Bridge also impacted Bridges success. Audre and Toni were exemplary sister-writers, emblematic of that great surge of Black feminist writing spilling into our hands in 1970s and 80s. As "sisters of the yam"... they stood up in unwavering solidarity with the rest of us "sisters of the rice, sisters of the corn, sisters of the plantain" and that mattered. It helped put Bridge, coedited by two "unknown" Chicana writers, on the political-literary map. All in all, it was a brave moment in feminist history."

""Poetry of Heroism" was presented at "Sister Comrade: Celebrating the Lives of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker" on November 3, 2007, at the First Congregational Church in Oakland, California. Angela Davis, Judy Grahn, Jewelle Gomez, Holly Near, Linda Tillery, and Mary Watkins were among the presenters who gave memorial tribute to these foremothers of the lesbian-of-color movement."

"Poets—incredible nature poets like Mary Oliver, Gabriela Mistral, or Audre Lorde—look deeply at the world and make us feel like we are connected. Poetry that addresses the natural world helps us repair that connection. When you are paying attention to something, it’s a way of loving something. How can we continue to hurt something that we love?"

"Audre Lorde was one of my role models when I first came out as a lesbian. Audre was an extraordinary African American lesbian writer. It really meant a lot to me that she wrote to me on three different occasions that the dedications to "Bashert" were important to her."

"Today's mic-hogging, fast-talking, contentious young (and old) lefties continue to hawk little books and pamphlets on revolution, always with choice words or documents from Marx, Mao, even Malcolm. But I've never seen a broadside with "A Black Feminist Statement or even the writings of Angela Davis or June Jordan or Barbara Omolade or Flo Kennedy or Audre Lorde or bell hooks or Michelle Wallace, at least not from the groups who call themselves leftist. These women's collective wisdom has provided the richest insights into American radicalism's most fundamental questions: How can we build a multiracial movement? Who are the working class and what do they desire? How do we resolve the Negro Question and the Woman Question? What is freedom?"

"We can watch a classic becoming. When Audre Lorde tells a room full of women, many lesbians, many Black women, "Your silence will not protect you," and Gloria Hull writes "Poem," dedicated to Audre Lorde, which concludes: "Dear Eshu's Audre/please keep on/teaching us/how/to speak/to know/that now/"our labor is/more important than/our silence" and this poem is chosen to introduce Conditions: Five-The Black Women's Issue, we know we're in the presence of something classic. The invocation. The passionate connection. The exhortation to speak."

"The poet Audre Lorde has said, "Poetry is not a luxury." I think it is no accident that these words were spoken by a Black lesbian radical poet, and that they have been echoed throughout the feminist writers community."

"Lorde is right: "Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.""

"we have learned from Lorde: At the same time as we organize behind specific and urgent issues, we must also develop and maintain an ongoing vision, and the theory following upon that vision, of why we struggle-of the shape and taste and philosophy of what we wish to see."

"We participate in, and are excited by, organizing that takes as a starting point the interconnections between struggles to dismantle our carceral state and to build just and flourishing public K-12 educational systems. These include LGBTQ liberation movements that reject criminalization as the response to gender and sexual violence in schools, immigration rights organizers who say no to legislation that pits children against parents, and anti-violence movements that do not rely on policing as their primary strategy for peace-building. As the Black feminist lesbian poet and scholar Audre Lorde wrote years ago, "There are not single-issue struggles because we do not live single-issue lives.""

"Audre Lorde's essay "Eye to Eye" was one of the very first readings on the list. It was the work everyone called to mind in our class as we spoke about how important it is for black women to stand in feminist solidarity with one another."

"in our human development we begin with ourselves and move outward toward relationship, and in writing work, it seems to be the same, that most writers begin with their own identity, with autobiography, and then move out toward family, friends, environment, country, world. I have noticed there's a return for many writers as they age…for others the world expands outward more and more, never returning to self...We need for writers to do both. We need the personal in its global context. I like writers that do both. I think of Audre Lorde, in Cancer Journals, a book that talks about disease, poetry, language, facing death, facing life, and it talks about the political and economic context of cancer in the U.S.-the cancer "business," the A.M.A. We need for writers to do both. We need the personal in its global context."

"She was a mover of large groups of people. She had a particular charge that transformed cultures. When we lose someone such as her (although we never really ever lose anything or anyone), we have to shift to accommodate the change. The poem addressed our collective change."

"Aymar Jean Christian of Northwestern University historically contextualizes and updates the notion of intersectional storytelling in his recent book Race and Media: Critical Approaches. “Most creators are ‘intersectional,’ meaning they identify with multiple communities marginalized by their race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, disability, or citizenship status,” he writes. He argues that the framework of intersectionality was developed throughout the 20th century by women writers of color like Sojourner Truth, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw. Those early intersectional writers sought to describe “the interlocking nature of oppression and the specificity of being both Black and woman (and often queer).”"

"This is not the first period during which we have confronted the difficult problem of using difference as a way of bringing people together, rather than as incontrovertible evidence of separation. There are more options than sameness, opposition, or hierarchical relations. One of the basic challenges confronting women of color today, as Audre Lorde has pointed out, is to think about and act upon notions of equality across difference. There are so many ways in which we can conceptualize coalitions, alliances, and networks that we would be doing ourselves a disservice to argue that there is only one way to construct relations across racial and ethnic boundaries. We cannot assume that if it does not unfold in one particular way, then it is not an authentic coalition."

"With its paradoxical title, Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde's most influential book of prose, is ever more trenchant twenty-three years after its first printing-surpassing even the reputation of her poetry, which is no minor feat...On the shelf with or at the bottom of that stack of other well-mined tomes-The Black Woman: An Anthology; Conditions: Five, The Black Women's Issue; Lesbian Fiction; Top Ranking-Sister is never far from me. I retain several dog-eared, underlined, coffee-splotched copies of her-at home, at work, on my nightstand-as necessary as my eyeglasses, my second sight... In one paragraph, Lorde can simultaneously blow away the entire Enlightenment project and use its tools, too. In 1990 I quoted myself in "Knowing the Danger and Going There Anyway," an article I wrote on Lorde for the Boston feminist newspaper, Sojourner; I'll change the sister trope and quote myself again: "I said that Audre Lorde's work is 'a neighbor I've grown up with, who can always be counted on for honest talk, to rescue me when I've forgotten the key to my own house, to go with me to a tenants' or town meeting, a community festival'."4 In 1990, Lorde was still walking among us. Sister Outsider has taken its creator's place as that good neighbor. And with this new edition, we will have our good neighbor and sister for another generation. May those of us who are Sister Outsider's old neighbors continue to be inspired by her luminous writing and may those new neighbors be newly inspired."

"I learned a lot from the black arts movement. I loved reading black feminist thinkers on my own (outside of academia)—Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Angela Davis, June Jordan, bell hooks, etc."

"At the library I would go the shelves alphabetically. I was drawn to anyone with a female name, with a Latino or Spanish name. There were very, very few. But as a teenager I discovered African American poetry. Gwendolyn Brooks was the first. Then Phillis Wheatley. I really identified with this slave woman writing poetry to assert and affirm her humanity. Suddenly my eyes were open to history. There was a whole explosion of African-American women poets-Audre Lorde, Nikki Giovanni, June Jordan. I have a poem in my head that's going to take me years to write down. Its working title is "On Thanking Black Muses." I owe them, because poetry really changed my life, saved it."

"Audre Lorde taught us, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”"

"Audre Lorde has said each of us must find the work that is ours to do."

"Lorde sees mortality as both weapon and power: "I am talking here about the need for every woman to live a considered life.""

"Poetry is not a luxury for women, explained Audre Lorde. It is the distillation of our experience, the moment of interpretation, the intuitive leap transcending the boundaries of the conventional coordinates on the official map designating our place in the world"

"I'm using the word nos/otras. Otras means other and nos means us, we. We don't have to keep using the oppositional language of the fathers. We were taught to write and think like these theorists. It's complicitous for somebody who is an "other" to be using "their" terms and "their" styles all the time. It's like fighting them with their own language. Audre Lorde said it very succinctly: "You cannot use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house."

"Adrienne Rich has also had a real influence on me and more recently Audre Lorde."

"No matter what the venue, we can be witnesses to our own existence. "If we do not define ourselves for ourselves," said Audre Lorde, "we will be defined by others- for their use and our detriment." Each generation must look around with a critical eye and ask, "Is this who I am? How will we be portrayed to future generations?""

"Weeks after the invasion, Grenadians were still smelling out and burying bodies which lay all over the island. The true casualty figures will never be known. No civilian body count is available. Even the bodies of Maurice Bishop and his slain ministers are never positively identified, no doubt to forestall any possible enshrinement by the people who loved him, no doubt to make the task of smearing his popular memory more easily accomplished. It has already begun."

"Hundreds of Grenadian bodies are buried in unmarked graves, relatives missing and unaccounted for, survivors stunned and frightened into silence by fear of being jailed and accused of “spreading unrest among the people.” No recognition and therefore no aid for the sisters, mothers, wives, children of the dead, families disrupted and lives vandalized by the conscious brutality of a planned, undeclared war. No attention given to the Grenadian bodies shipped back and forth across the sea in plastic bodybags from Barbados to Grenada to Cuba and back again to Grenada. After all, they all look alike, and besides, maybe if they are flown around the world long enough they will simply disappear, or become invisible, or some other peoples’ sacrifice."

"In addition to being a demonstration to the Caribbean community of what will happen to any country that dares to assume responsibility for its own destiny, the invasion of Grenada also serves as a naked warning to thirty million African-americans. Watch your step. We did it to them down there and we will not hesitate to do it to you."

"With the constant manipulation of the media, many Black americans are honestly confused, defending “our” invasion of Black Grenada under a mistaken mirage of patriotism. Nineteen eighty-four is upon us, and doublethink has come home to scramble our brains and blanket our protest."

"We had to metabolize such hatred that our cells have learned to live upon it because we had to, or die of it. Old King Mithridates learned to eat arsenic bit by bit and so outwitted his poisoners, but I’d have hated to kiss him upon his lips! Now we deny such hatred ever existed because we have learned to neutralize it through ourselves, and the catabolic process throws off waste products of fury even when we love."

"We do not love ourselves, therefore we cannot love each other. Because we see in each other’s face our own face, the face we never stopped wanting. Because we survived and survival breeds desire for more self. A face we never stopped wanting at the same time as we try to obliterate it."

"To grow up metabolizing hatred like daily bread means that eventually every human interaction becomes tainted with the negative passion and intensity of its by-products — anger and cruelty."

"Sometimes it seems that anger alone keeps me alive; it burns with a bright and undiminished flame. Yet anger, like guilt, is an incomplete form of human knowledge. More useful than hatred, but still limited. Anger is useful to help clarify our differences, but in the long run, strength that is bred by anger alone is a blind force which cannot create the future. It can only demolish the past. Such strength does not focus upon what lies ahead, but upon what lies behind, upon what created it — hatred. And hatred is a deathwish for the hated, not a lifewish for anything else."

"Growing up, metabolizing hatred like a daily bread. Because I am Black, because I am woman, because I am not Black enough, because I am not some particular fantasy of a woman, because I AM. On such a consistent diet, one can eventually come to value the hatred of one’s enemies more than one values the love of friends, for that hatred becomes the source of anger, and anger is a powerful fuel."

"Anger — a passion of displeasure that may be excessive or misplaced but not necessarily harmful. Hatred — an emotional habit or attitude of mind in which aversion is coupled with ill will. Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does."

"We have to consciously study how to be tender with each other until it becomes a habit because what was native has been stolen from us, the love of Black women for each other."

"The power to kill is less than the power to create, for it produces an ending rather than the beginning of something new."

"Addie Mae Collins, Carol Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Denise McNair. Four little Black girls, none more than ten years of age, singing their last autumn song in a Sunday church school in . After the explosion clears it is not possible to tell which patent leather Sunday shoe belongs to which found leg."

"Survival is the greatest gift of love."

"To search for power within myself means I must be willing to move through being afraid to whatever lies beyond. If I look at my most vulnerable places and acknowledge the pain I have felt, I can remove the source of that pain from my enemies’ arsenals. My history cannot be used to feather my enemies’ arrows then, and that lessens their power over me. Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself."

"How are you practicing what you preach — whatever you preach, and who exactly is listening? As Malcolm stressed, we are not responsible for our oppression, but we must be responsible for our own liberation. It is not going to be easy, but we have what we have learned and what we have been given that is useful. We have the power those who came before us have given us, to move beyond the place where they were standing. We have the trees, and water, and sun, and our children. Malcolm X does not live in the dry texts of his words as we read them; he lives in the energy we generate and use to move along the visions we share with him. We are making the future as well as bonding to survive the enormous pressures of the present, and that is what it means to be a part of history."