How Poetry Can Guide Us Through Trauma

In her foundational 1977 essay, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” the Black feminist writer Audre Lorde argued that the art form transcends the constraints of the written word. Poetry doesn’t just reflect the world as it exists, she insisted; rather, it ushers in a new one. “It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action,” Lorde wrote. Later, she added that “there are no new ideas … only new ways of making them felt.”

In recent months, as we trudge through the morass of These Unprecedented Times, I’ve returned often to Lorde’s words. Poems have alchemized death and imagined the continuation of lives cut short by racist violence. They’ve given texture to the “” of life brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, to countless readers. In moments of uncertainty, poetry has to the past—and shown how might alter the future.