SOURCE: "Poems Are Not Luxuries," in Claims for Poetry, edited by Donald Hall, The University of Michigan Press, 1982, pp. 282-85.

In the following essay—which the poet herself described as one of her "core pieces " of expository prose—Lorde characterizes poetry as a "vital necessity" for women: "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." This piece was written in 1977.

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give...