Poetry and politics: Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and the women's liberation movement

""Poetry is not a luxury," Audre Lorde argues, but "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." In a similar vein, Adrienne Rich writes, "poetry/isn't revolution but a way of knowing/why it must come." Here, and throughout their work, both Lorde and Rich argue for an understanding of poetry that incorporates political analysis and an urgent belief in the necessity of social change. Poetry and politics were inseparable for Lorde and Rich, a driving force in their lives, and central to their remarkable friendship. The two met at City College in 1968, the start of a lifelong collaboration that would help to shape the Women's Liberation Movement and American poetry. Rich was born in 1929 and raised in a white middle-class family in Baltimore, and was already an established poet by this first meeting. Born half a decade later in Harlem to parents who had immigrated from Grenada, Audre Lorde had just published her first book of poetry when she met Rich.