My Sweet Lorde

The following article, based on a telephone interview I did with the late poet Audre Lorde (1934-1992), was published in NYQ magazine, December 15, 1991. The magazine, later renamed QW, is now defunct. It was co-edited by Maer Roshan, who later edited New York and Radar magazines. I reprint the article in commemoration of Black History Month.


"Poetry," according to Audre Lorde, "is a weapon for change. I see it as one of the most subversive uses of language there is because we are in the business of altering feelings. As June Jordan said once, 'We're in the business of making revolution irresistible.'"
Although Lorde has lived for the last six years in the U.S. Virgin Islands, she returns to New York City regularly because her son and daughter are here and the cancer treatments she requires are unavailable in St. Croix.
When she lived on Staten Island, Lorde explains in a phone conversation from the Caribbean, "I was every day going to war. If you've been reading the papers, you know about the racial situation on Staten Island. It's gotten worse, from my understanding, since I left." In response, she has sought refuge in the relatively more sedate Virgin Islands. Racism, classism, homophobia, and sexism exist there, too, she concedes, "but on a different scale."
Her selection as New York's State Poet is, in Lorde's eyes, "a contradiction." She wonders what that appointment really means in a state where many see her, and those like her, as irreconcilably other. "In New York State," she says, "a black woman can be raped and her college-student attackers are freed, where attacks on lesbians and gay men are increasing. It's an intense contradiction. I see my function, the function of all poets, as attempting to learn the lessons of these contradictions and learning how to use ourselves to lessen them."
"Part of my work," Lorde concludes, "is to ask every person I come in contact with: 'How are you using yourself?' 'How are you doing your work?' 'How do you define yourself?' 'How are you using that self to fight for what you believe in?'"