The Sonnet Is Not a Luxury

Abstract

The Sonnet Is Not a Luxury Lisa L. Moore (bio) “I went to Catholic schools, you see,” said Audre Lorde. “Now smartness was not as important as being good, and I was really bad.” In the 1996 documentary Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde, the poet recounted a series of schoolgirl crimes, but the one she knew would really shock us was the story of her first published poem. Eyebrow raised, lip curled, hands imitating the disapproving gestures of the nuns, Lorde performed the irony of claiming a very traditional verse form, the sonnet, as the height of bad-girl bravura: I learned about sonnets by reading Edna St. Vincent Millay’s love sonnets and loving them and deciding I was going to try. . . . I was editor of my high school magazine and I wrote a poem about love. And . . . the faculty advisor said it was a bad sonnet. And I really knew that it was a good one. But I knew that she didn’t like it because of the things that I said in it. So I sent it off to Seventeen magazine and they bought it. And I made more money from that one poem than I made for the next ten years. Audre Lorde’s poems, usually associated with the directly political and confessional open forms of second-wave feminist poetry and the vernacular and confrontational styles of the Black Arts Movement, have been overlooked as part the history of the sonnet. Indeed, although Lorde’s poems are “widely anthologized, honored by numerous awards, and praised by contemporary poets,” they have “received little critical attention.” Lorde’s perhaps unexpected interest in the sonnet challenges critics to “look to the insides of archives and bodies of work themselves in their original contexts” when reading Black poetry. [End Page 248] Elizabeth Alexander cautions us against reading such poems “just as we receive them . . . with the hard-to-avoid periodizing, tidying-up impulses of the presents in which they are made.” Lorde’s first publication, which does not appear in any of her collections, is a poem I do not want to see lost to history, or dismissed as juvenilia. Alexander reminds us: “it is testimony, or the text itself, that takes us inside the black interior, a moment, a movement.” Lorde’s first published poem takes us inside the Black interior of the modern sonnet, its revision, rejection, and revival. As part of the work of what I call elsewhere “a lesbian history of the sonnet,” this essay centers the queer, Black, and feminist energies of this compact, powerful, and explosive form. Lorde’s first published poem, entitled “Spring,” was attributed to “Audrey Lorde” in the popular fashion periodical Seventeen in April 1951. It began: “I am afraid of spring; there is no peace here, / The agony of growing things is in my veins.” Appearing as it does in a fashion magazine with, that month, a pink cover showing a white boy and girl holding hands, the poem surprised with its emphasis on death, burial, a speaker sobbing with fear. In the biographical statement that appeared on the same page of the magazine, “Audrey Lorde” described herself as a collector of “folk songs . . . and old books.” She mentioned a special “prize” from her “searches through Fourth Avenue bookshops,” “an ancient and yellowed copy of the romantic Poets.” Just a few months past 17 years old herself, Lorde was already developing a complex sense of the multiple sources of her poetic vocation. Describing her interest in “folk songs,” “Audrey” claimed membership not only in the Greenwich Village beatnik scene she was already exploring with sister Hunter High School student and future Beat poet Diane di Prima, but also the blues and folk vernacular traditions brought into the literary mainstream by Langston Hughes and other poets of the Harlem Renaissance, whom Lorde knew through her participation in the Harlem Writers Guild. Finally, she claimed lineage from the English Romantic poets, a bold assertion for a young woman [End Page 249] who, in this bio in a mainstream, white-dominated magazine, did not explicitly claim her identity as Black. The first African American teens to be identified...