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CONVOCATION + METONYMY Audre Lorde, The Collected Poems ofAudre Lorde (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997), 489 pp.
Educator, political essayist, civil rights advocate, novelist, and poet Audre Lorde (1934-1992) left us a body of work that, with the publication of this 500-page volume, demands to be read as a significant contribution to the diverse culture of opposition forged by a wide range of writers and artists in New York City at the onset of the 1 970swhen social promise and artistic production conspired jointly at times across aesthetic boundaries.
Contemporary with poets as dissimilar as Diane DiPrima, Amiri Baraka, Ted Berrigan or Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde wrote anthems about rising from the figurative or real poverties of everyday life; about self-determination, and the continuity of kinship; about the various rites of passage from daughterhood to maternity- as if in perfect keeping with other transits. . . of night into day, or of one season into another. She wrote also, to be more specific, about what it meant to be a black woman in the United States: in a speech devoid of apology or ingratiating gesture, a language that glimmers with complex imagemaking and argument:
I
Is the total black, being spoken
From the earth's inside.
There are many kinds of open.
How the diamond comes into a knot of flame
How a sound comes into a word, coloured
By who pays what for speaking.
("Coal")
In her most accomplished work (much of it from the books New York Head Shop and Museum, 1970; Between Our Selves, 1976; and Our Dead Behind Us, 1986) Lorde mastered a kind of poem that took seemingly flat statement and wrought it bluntly into unexpected curves of phrasing and conclusion. A poem of 1976 unfolds...