As one of her most famous pieces, I was surprised to see that it’s only four pages long. Thinking back, on my younger self, I wonder how much attention I paid to this piece on first encountering this collection.

When poetry was simply another unit in English class, I didn’t think much about being an attentive poetry reader.” If you paid attention, copied your notes accurately from the chalkboard or projector, you could memorize the themes and the relevant literary terms and their definitions. You needn’t develop a skill, you only needed to get by.

As an independent reader, though, school days behind me, I was a novel-reader above all else. Not a short story reader at that time, yet, either. It’s possible that I looked at this essay and thought “not for me.” Neither the poetry, nor the luxury. It’s possible that, in this way, I overlooked the relevance of Audre Lorde’s ideas and beliefs about difference in this context, that I thought her audience for this piece was somebody else very different from me.

In Joan Wylie Hall’s edited volume Conversations with Audre Lorde, ironically, I learned from her 1979 interview with Adrienne Rich, that this essay was the first piece of prose that Audre Lorde had written in years:

“For some reason, the more poetry I wrote, the less I felt I could write prose. Someone would ask for a book review, or, when I worked at the library, for a précis about books—it wasn’t that I didn’t have the skills. I knew about sentences by that time. I knew how to construct a paragraph. But communicating deep feeling in linear, solid blocks of print felt arcane, a method beyond me.”

In 1986, in “The Creative Use of Difference,” Marion Kraft asks her if poetry is “the most important of all these various aspects of her life” and Lorde replies that it’s not the most important but the “strongest expression I have of certain ways of making, identifying, and using my own power.”

She describes poetry as “the skeleton architecture of our lives” which feels like a lot to absorb. But, as she explains, it becomes clear: “because it helps to form the dreams for a future that has not yet been, and toward which we must work, when we speak of change.”

Four years later, in an interview with Charles H. Rowell, she says that this essay and “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger” are the two core pieces of her writing: both approach “difficult questions we have got to raise among ourselves.” She speaks of the need to “make necessary power out of necessary surroundings.”

Regarding her writing process with these pieces: “To write each of those essays I went down really deep, and I started with core questions.” It was a challenge: “I had never written prose like that before. I’m not basically a prose writer; I’m a poet.” But she did not turn away: “So I’ve had to teach myself how to write prose, how to think in solid, linear paragraphs. And it has not been an easy task.”

This essay, concise and precise, feels so authoritative that it’s hard to reconcile with the idea that its author was writing towards understanding rather than expressing an understanding.

“I learned an enormous amount in the writing. They felt like black holes—these small, but incredibly condensed pieces of matter. The ideas and the feelings and questions that are raised in each one of them proliferate through everything I have ever written. They serve as a take-off point for later work; my own, and, I hope, other people’s.”

It’s a challenge to extract a sentence or two, even a short passage, from an essay this concise. When I select one sentence, the next one seems just as important, and the following sentence seems to hold a power accrued from the previous sentences. Isolating any part of it seems to do the essay a disservice.

So, instead, I’ll share some of the other reading I did alongside this essay. Pieces that also seemed to reverberate with Audre Lorde’s prose. As if eavesdropping on a conversation.

The struggles in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body (2021), his closeted identity and challenges faced with coming-out rang in my ears with this passage in Audre Lorde’s essay: “As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.”

In much of Jericho Brown’s The Tradition (2019) this passage of Audre Lorde’s, from this essay, echoed: “These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through the darkness.” For instance, in the final lines of  his poem “Hero:” “Gratitude is black – Black as a hero returning from war to a country that banked on his death. Thank God. It can’t get much darker than that.”

Next time, thoughts on a piece just one page longer than this one: “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” Even if you’re not familiar, I bet you’ll recognise a line or two.