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In 1968 I was invited as poet in residence to Tugaloo College, which is a small Black college in Jackson Mississippi, and it changed my life. It changed my life. I had a chance to work with young Black poets in what was essentially a crisis situation. I mean white townspeople were shooting up the edges of Tugaloo at night. Many of the students had been arrested. It was siege situation. But I also needed to bring to it everything that I was. Because I had never spoken as a poet before, I had never spoken at all as a matter of fact. I had certainly never taught. But I knew that there was something urgent happening and there was something inside of me that could be shared with these young people and something they had to teach me. The six weeks that I spent at Tugaloo convinced me that I wanted to work with my poetry in other ways than hitherto I thought poetry was. That took care of me privately, and there was the other work that I did in the world. I was a librarian. I could get people to read. I could open up heads and touch feelings through other people’s words. I realized I could take my art in the realest way and make it do what I wanted. Not as propaganda, but as altering feelings and lives. And that in order to really, really do that—I had to be everything I was. I was married to a White man. I was in an interracial marriage at a time when certainly any kind of congress between Black and White people was anathema, a growing anathema within the Black community. I needed, for example, to have that be clear to the Black students I was working with at Tugaloo because it was a contradiction that they needed to be aware of as well as I. How did this become so integrated within me? So it was at that point that I began looking at using and bringing my poetry and my deepest held convictions together; and it’s a journey that I’m still on.
posting b/c i didn’t know she was at Tougaloo at all, let alone during the Civil Rights Movement. and i’m wondering how directly my not knowing is related to the white-washing/appropriation of Lorde by f*eminists specifically and white progressives generally. because that “the masters tools” and “poetry is not a luxury” take on much more specific, anti-kyriarchal, less-able-to-be-individualsized *meanings* when you place them in the context of black institutions and black life and black concerns - you know, with that pesky social death hovering at the edges of your subjectivity/being and whatnot.
(via so-treu)
