Soren Kaur/OutWrite
Content warning: discussion of the prison-industrial complex
“I speak here of poetry as the revelation or distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean — in order to cover their desperate wish for imagination without insight. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. 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. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.” – Audre Lorde
“Poetry, therefore, is not what we simply recognize as the formal ‘poem,’ but a revolt: a scream in the night, an emancipation of language and old ways of thinking.” – Robin D. G. Kelley
One of the first readings I did for LGBTQS 181: Queer Abolitionist Poetics, held in Winter 2024, was Audre Lorde’s 1985 essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” In it, Lorde asserts that through poetry “we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless — about to be birthed, but already felt.” Lorde asks us to view life as something to be experienced, not a problem to solve — to view our feelings as cherished sources of power and knowledge instead of treasures to bury deep inside.
Our poetry and dreams unlock those wells of power that can lead to true lasting action. Lorde writes, “It is our dreams that point the way to freedom. They are made realizable through our poems that give us the strength and courage to see, to feel, to speak, and to dare. If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is a luxury, then we have given up the core — the fountain — of our power, our womanness; we have given up the future of our worlds.”
My first time reading “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” was revolutionary. As someone who loves creative writing, I’ve often been told that writing poetry or novels is a luxury: not a need, but a want. Seeing poetry described as vital to our very existence, as necessary as food or water, affirmed my love and passion for the written word in a way I didn’t know I needed.
In class, I was introduced to the prison abolition movement, which aims to tear down the carceral state and all systems and institutions that inform and uphold it. The movement seeks to replace them with new structures of reparation, compassion, and liberation. We viewed prison abolition through the lens of queerness and transness, acknowledging the disproportionate numbers of queer and trans people incarcerated. We also tried to understand how to articulate the language and visuals of abolition and queer liberation through poetic language and forms.
Our focus on abolition didn’t stop at prisons. Imagining a world without prisons also meant confronting the police establishment, the gender binary, the military industrial complex, and all other logics that reinforce the system of mass incarceration in the United States. The realities of the American carceral state, witnessed through the poetry we read, were frightening and disheartening.
While the current systems of oppression we live under can feel daunting and impossible to overcome, the poetry we read asked us to imagine a world beyond that. Jackie Wang’s essay “The Prison Abolitionist Imagination: A Conversation” asks “[Is] the prison itself a problem for thought that can only be unthought using a mode of thinking that does not capitulate to the realism of the Present? Can the reenchantment of the world be an instrument that we use to shatter the realism of the prison?”
While rhetoric lies in the cold, hard realities of the present, the imagination of our poetry can breathe something new, something different, something better to life.
Marquis Bey explores abolition of social strictures in “Black Trans Feminism.” Bey understands nonnormativity as an abolitionist gesture which forms the ideological foundation of queer abolitionist resistance and self-determination. The nonnormative doesn’t depend on conforming to legible, sanctioned identities and modes of life, and doesn’t only seek to oppose those identities and ways of life. Bey writes, “The nonnormative, thus, does not accept or decline — it doesn’t ‘cline’ at all; the nonnormative is an operation on other grounds and by other means not predicated on legibilizing identities, knowledges, or sense-making apparatuses already in place.”
In order to realize a world without carceral logics — without the rigid structures of power-laden social categories holding us back from fluid, queer liberation — we need to be able to create those worlds in our artistic and creative practices. In order to create something new in our reality, we need to be willing to try new things in our creative practices.
We must adopt a queer abolitionist poetic framework. Queer abolitionist poetics mean finding new ways to queer the forms and language of poetry in order to queer the ways society thinks about queerness and abolition. It means mirroring the ways we want to queer the world and shaping society with the very structure and language of the poems we write. It means using poetry as allegory for the new worlds that we want to create. As Saidiya Hartman writes in her introduction to Zong!, “To disassemble the word is to disassemble the ordered world.” That is the crux of queer abolitionist poetics: disassembling the world as we know it to create new worlds of joy and liberation.
Art and creative practices must engage with queer world-making to ensure that we can survive and that future generations of queer people can thrive. The work of our generation is to create a better world full of queer joy, community, and liberation.
Poetry is a revolutionary tool— a stepping stone for inspiring abolitionist action. Through poetry, we can begin to undo oppressive systems of power by imagining worlds of joy and community for current and future generations of queer people.
Voicing our imaginations and dreams proves that the worlds of our dreams do exist. The fact that we can articulate a world of queer liberation and joy must mean that world exists. Queer liberation is not only possible — it is necessary. The liberation of our world through queer poetics is not a luxury. There will be no freedom until we are all free.
Credits:
Author: Mary Nassar (She/Her)
Artist: Soren Kaur (They/Them)
Copy Editors: Gwendolyn Hill (She/Her), Emma Blakely (She/He/They)