Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in one of the touchstones of literary criticism, offers an account of the imagination:

This power, first put into action by the will and understanding, and retained under their irremissive, though gentle and unnoticed, control reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; judgment ever awake and steady self-possession with enthusiasm and feeling profound or vehement; and while it blends and harmonizes the natural and the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter; and our admiration of the poet to our sympathy with the poetry.

This account, it’s commonly and justly felt, is unsurpassed, and it proves its worth in alerting and directing our attention towards actual poems. For while Coleridge describes an enduring achievement of the imagination, its significance will depend on political, social, and personal circumstances of a poem’s making.

            For American poet Audre Lorde, the reconciliation or balance “of sameness with difference,” “of the general with the concrete,” and of “the individual, with the representative” have political valence that extends beyond poetry, but that poetry can bring about.  “Difference and Survival: An Address at Hunter College” is one of the most important of her essays, important because it offers a defense of poetry in political terms while also suggesting how the technical challenges of realizing the power of the imagination—as Coleridge understands it—have revolutionary potential, which the younger Coleridge would have appreciated:

Often, we do not even speak of difference, which is a comparison of attributes best evaluated buy their possible effect and illumination within our lives. Instead, we speak of deviance, which is a judgment upon the relationship between the attribute and some long-fixed and established construct. Somewhere on the edge of all our consciousness there is what I call the mythical norm, which each of us knows within our hearts is “not me.” In this society, that norm is usually defined as white, thin, male, young, heterosexual, Christian, and financially secure. It is within this mythical norm that the trappings of power reside. Those of us who stand outside that power, for any reason, often identify one way in which we are different, and we assume that quality to be the primary reason for all oppression. We forget those other distortions around difference, some of which we ourselves may be acting out within our daily lives. For unacknowledged difference robs all of us of each other’s energy and creative insight, and creates a false hierarchy.

.           .           .           .           .

The house of your difference is the longing of your greatest power and your deepest vulnerability. It is an indelible part of your life’s arsenal. If you allow your difference, whatever it might be, to be defined for you by imposed externals, then it will be defined to your detriment, always, for that definition must be dictated by the need of your society, rather than by a merging between the needs of that society and the human needs of self. But as you acknowledge your difference and examine how you wish to use it and for what—the creative power of difference explored—then you can focus it towards a future which we must commit ourselves to in some particular way if it is to come to pass at all.[i]

This is not a denial of sameness, but a warning against the instinct to insist upon sameness and to see only those differences that have been predetermined as significant: differences that are determined on one's behalf. It is a plea that difference be worked for, as a source of liberation not only from political oppression but from the limitations of the political imagination. Coleridge’s vision of the imagination reconciling sameness and difference, individual and representative, and novelty and freshness with the old and familiar is a necessary counterpart to Audre Lorde’s speech, if we are to appreciate what her poetry effects—and what it takes as its subject matter. For Lorde’s poetry is about the experience of recovering difference from sameness, and about recovering true difference, the difference of an individual, from the differences of socially sanctioned representations. It imagines what it is for the imagination to do its political work, as a process that encounters resistance in the unfolding of time. In some of her finest poetry, she represents the action of the imagination leading to a recognition of difference—something that is possible only through what Lorde refers to, in the opening of her speech, as “the intimacy of scrutiny.” 

Here is a remarkable poem, “Keyfood,” published in 1974’s New York Head Shop and Museum:

In the Keyfood Market on Broadway

a woman waits

by the window

daily and patient

the comings and goings of buyers

neatly labeled old

like yesterday’s bread

her restless experienced eyes

weigh fears like grapefruit

Once in the market 

she was more

comfortable than wealthy

more black than white

more proper than friendly

more rushed than alone

all her powers defined her

like a carefully kneaded loaf

rising and restrained

working and making loving

behind secret eyes.

Once she was all

the sums of her knowing

counting on her to sustain them

once she was more

somebody else’s mother than mine

now she weighs faces

as once she weighed grapefruit.

Waiting

she does not count her change

Her lonely eyes measure

all who enter the market

are they new

are they old

enough

can they buy each other?

The poem records two simultaneous acts of scrutiny: Lorde scrutinizing the woman, and the woman scrutinizing those who enter the market. It cannot be said in any simple sense that either are seeking what is “different,” as if the “different” were a category worthy of perception: they are instead trying to see and, in seeing, Lorde imagines and invites us to conceive, in the final question of the poem, that the woman imagines too. Nor is it right to say that the poem and the woman in it imagine the lives they observe to adorn them with difference. Instead, within a single arc, the intimacy of scrutiny kindles the imagination, and the imagination, directed and sustained on another person, with its powers activated, discerns the difference within their sameness, the novelty within familiarity. 

The full arc of the woman’s imaginative journey in the poem takes place between “the comings and goings of buyers” in the fifth line and “can they buy each other,” and the arc of Lorde’s imagination coincides with hers. The first phrase subsumes the people she watches to shoppers, defined by the Keyfood Market. In that place, that is what they are. The buyers that she sees are “neatly labeled old”—and she is herself “neatly labeled old” by Lorde: the phrase is suspended so that it could attach to the woman or to what she sees. We never find out what she “waits” for: she waits, perhaps, for any who enter the shop, a waiting that is always fulfilled and always renewed; perhaps she waits for the moment of insight that nearly arrives at the end of the poem, but that stops at an abyss of uncertainty. But she also “waits” for the poet, and she weights the poem, the weight of her waiting measured in its lines. Such wordplay is vindicated by the poem’s own language, where “wait” and “weight” and “waiting” press against and bleed into one another.

As she is seen by the poem, she undergoes a change, and the line “she does not count her change” tells us both that she changes and that she is unaware of her change; it also suggests that she does not register the difference between price and payment that the change reveals—the difference between what was given and what was received, the fact that the two do not equate to one another. But she counts the change in others: “are they new” is not “are they young” because she does not measure age but freshness of experience, new material for her eyes and imagination to work on. “New” and “old” would make a contrast; it is “enough” that makes a measure, suggests a scale that she possesses to which we are not made privy, a scale by which she can judge whether they will serve to satisfy her waiting (in this, they are like the grapefruit that she once weighed): she wants to set “old enough” against “new enough”, the same against the different. 

I think we can hear the woman’s voice and the poet’s merging in the final question of the poem which balances astonishment (“can buy each other?”) alongside skeptical resistance (“can they buy each other?” or “can they buy each other?”). The questions decide whether they are equivalent, whether they can be exchanged (with whatever “difference” might be left over), or neatly interchanged. Both she and the poet arrive at this question as an epiphany, which is a surprise in itself, but our surprise at their surprise at what we take to be obvious suggests that, for Lorde, our obvious answer (“no they cannot buy each other”) does not recognize what is really being asked, or what our usual practices of seeing and knowing others involves. In the comparisons we make, in the reduction of individuals to sameness, we suggest that they might “buy” each other, since the terms of value to which they are reduced are uniform. We should attune ourselves to the connotations of prostitution in the phrase, “can they buy each other,” which are opposed to the true intimacy in “intimacy of scrutiny.” 

In her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde defends the political significance of the erotic, a dimension of life that has been suppressed and misunderstood, but that, for Lorde, offers liberating potential:

When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual's. But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. 

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

With this in mind, we can begin to see how the erotic is alive even in a poem, “Keyfood,” that is not about sexual desire. For the woman in the poem waits with longing for those who enter the shop, as she once weighed grapefruit: to satisfy some hunger. Jonathan Lear’s Platonic conception of the erotic clarifies the full contours of the concept in Lorde’s argument: “in our finite condition if lack, we reach out to the world in yearning, longing, admiration, and desire for that which (however mistakenly) we take the be valuable, beautiful, and good”.[ii] At the same time as this broadest account of the erotic accommodates the woman’s gaze at those who enter the shop, it allows us to appreciate that Lorde’s fascination with the woman is likewise erotic, founded on a yearning for what is absent, and for, at that root, a primal yearning of human existence:

once she was more

somebody else’s mother than mine

Here, in the word “mine,” the sole first-person pronoun of the poem, the poet’s life and the woman’s life intersect in an oblique glancing phrase that raises more questions than it could answer: she now resembles the poet’s mother more than she once did; she has grown so familiar to the poet to be like her mother; she is the poet’s mother but was not always so fully available to the poet as a mother as she is now; more are possible. Whatever the reading, the estranged intimacy of the lines bespeaks a longing that is unfulfilled and essential to her sense of self. When she and the woman together ask of the shoppers, “can they buy each other?” they are setting this sense of erotic against the alternative: the pornographic. From Lorde’s essay:

When we look away from the importance of the erotic in the development and sustenance of our power, or when we look away from ourselves as we satisfy our erotic needs in concert with others, we use each other as objects of satisfaction rather than share our joy in the satisfying, rather than make connection with our similarities and our differences. To refuse to be conscious of what we are feeling at any time, however comfortable that might seem, is to deny a large part of the experience and to allow ourselves to be reduced to the pornographic, the abused, and the absurd.

In the lines “once she was more | somebody else’s mother than mine,” the poet’s consciousness of her own feelings flickers into view; she acknowledges her own longing for the longing, waiting woman, and we can see that, not only in these lines, but as a whole, the poem is extraordinarily intimate, sharing in the yearning (not satisfaction) of its subject. We might say that the intimacy of scrutiny briefly brings about an encounter of the poet and the poem in a shared perplexity over similar and difference (is it her mother? is she like her mother? in what way? the comparison is not fully evolved or articulated). We might also say that in the scrutiny of intimacy, the poem avoids what Lorde terms the pornographic, which would consist of using the woman as an object of aesthetic satisfaction (she makes the poem what it is); instead, in these lines, Lorde delivers herself to the poem and its subject and shares in their experience. 

The erotic experience that Lorde describes is only possible with the intimacy of scrutiny that permits the discovery of true difference and sameness; it is only possible with the fully activated faculty of the imagination directed towards the life of others. Lorde demonstrates and reflects upon this activity of the imagination in “Outlines,” one of her finest poems, and also one in which the political significance of sameness and difference emerges from an intimacy that is erotic:

Outlines

I

What hue lies in the slit of anger

ample and pure as night

what color the channel

blood comes through?

A Black woman and a white woman

charter our courses close

in a sea of calculated distance

warned away by reefs of hidden anger

histories rallied against us

the friendly face of cheap alliance.

Jonquils through the Mississippi snow

you entered my vision

with the force of hurled rock

defended by distance and a warning smile

fossil tears       pitched over the heart’s wall

for protection

no other women

grown beyond safety

come back to tell us

whispering

past the turned shoulders

of our closest

we were not the first

Black woman white woman

Altering course to fit our own journey

        ____________

In this treacherous sea

even the act of turning

is almost fatally difficult

coming around full face

into a driving storm

putting an end to running

before the wind.

On a helix of white

the letting of blood

the face of my love

and rage

coiled in my brown arms

an ache in the bone

we cannot alter history

by ignoring it

nor the contradictions 

who we are.

     II

A Black woman and a white woman

in the open fact of our loving

with not only our enemies’ hands

raised against us

means a gradual sacrifice

of all that is simple

dreams

where you walk the mountain

still as a water-spirit

your arms lined with scalpels

and I hide the strength of my hungers

like a throwing knife in my hair.

        ____________

Guilt wove through quarrels like barbed wire

fights in the half forgotten schoolyard

gob of spit in a childhood street

yet both our mothers once scrubbed kitchens

in houses where comfortable women

died a separate silence

our mothers’ nightmares

trapped into familiar hatred

the convenience of others drilled into their lives

like studding into a wall

they taught us to understand

only the strangeness of men.

To give      but not beyond what is wanted

to speak      as well as to bear

the weight of hearing

Fragments of the word wrong

clung to my lashes like ice

confusing my vision with a crazed brilliance

your face      distorted into grids

of magnified complaint

our first winter

we made a home outside of symbol

learned to drain the expansion tank together

to look beyond the agreed-upon disguises

not to cry each other’s tears.

How many Februarys

shall I like this acid soil

inch by inch

reclaimed through our gathered waste?

from the wild onion shoots of April

to mulch in the August sun

squash blossoms      a cement driveway

kale and tomatoes

muscles etch the difference

between I need and forever.

When we first met

I had never been

for a walk in the woods

     III

light catches two women on a trail

together      embattled by choice

carving an agenda with tempered lightning

and no certainties

we mark tomorrow

examining every cell of the past

for what is useful      stoked by furies

we were supposed to absorb by forty

still we grow      more precise with each usage

like falling stars or torches

we print each other’s resolutions

our weaknesses      no longer hateful.

When women make love

beyond the first exploration

we meet each other      knowing

in a landscape

the rest of our lives

attempts to understand.

     IV

Leaf-dappled the windows lighten

after a battle that leaves our night in tatters

and we two glad to be alive      and tender

the outline of your ear pressed on my shoulder

keeps a broken dish from becoming always

We rise to dogshit      dumped on our front porch

the brass windchimes from Sundance stolen

despair offerings of the 8 A.M. News

reminding us we are still at war

and not with each other

“give us 22 minutes and we will give you the world…”

and still we dare

to say we are committed

sometimes without relish.

Ten blocks down the street

a cross is burning

we are a Black woman and a white woman

with two Black children

you talk with our next-door neighbors

I register for a shotgun

we secure the tender perennials

against an early frost

reconstructing a future we fuel

from our living       different precisions

In the next room a canvas chair

whispers beneath your weight

a breath of you between laundered towels

the flinty places that do not give.

    V

Your face upon my shoulder

a crescent of freckle over bone

what we share      illuminates what we do not

the rest is a burden of history

we challenge

bearing each bitter piece to the light

we hone ourselves upon each other’s courage

loving 

as we cross the mined bridge      fury

tuned like a Geiger counter

to softest place.

One straight light hair on the washbasin’s rim

difference

intimate as a borrowed scarf

the children arrogant as mirrors

our pillows’ mingled scent

this grain of our particular days

keeps a fine sharp edge

to which I cling like a banner

in a choice of winds

seeking an emotional language

in which to abbreviate time.

I trace the curve of your jaw

with a lover’s finger

knowing the hardest battle

is only the first

how to do what we need for our living

with honor and in love

we have chosen each other

and the edge of each other’s battles

the war is the same

if we lose

someday women’s blood will congeal

upon a dead planet

if we win

there is no telling.

The poem recounts the violence necessary to their relationship, in the encounter, and loving struggle, of one person with another, and in the resistance of both women against the world. In both cases, the struggle is political: it depends on their recovering shared histories and on their refusing what others would make of them because of who they are, according to the categories by which sameness and difference are assigned in the world. Both in their relation to one another and in their unified relationship to the world, they struggle for a difference that redeems those terms of sameness that they cannot do without if they are to make sense of themselves as social and historical beings. But what makes the poem come alive is its doing more than recounting this effort. As a poem it does what the women attempt to do; and in its form, it registers the difficulty that it, as a work of art, and they, as living persons, confront. Hence the typographical hiatuses in the middle of lines:

        Jonquils through the Mississippi snow

        you entered my vision

        with the force of hurled rock

        defended by distance and a warning smile

        fossil tears           pitched over the heart’s wall

        for protection

                                 To give      but not beyond what is wanted

                                 to speak      as well as to bear

                                 to mulch in the August sun

                                 squash blossoms      a cement driveway

                                 kale and tomatoes

                                 muscles etch the difference

                                 between I need and forever.

                                 light catches two women on a trail

                                 together      embattled by choice

                                 carving an agenda with tempered lightning

                                 and no certainties

                                 we mark tomorrow

                                 examining every cell of the past

                                 for what is useful      stoked by furies

                                 we were supposed to absorb by forty

                                 still we grow      more precise with each usage

                                 like falling stars or torches

                                 we print each other’s resolutions

                                 our weaknesses      no longer hateful.

                                 reconstructing a future we fuel

                                 from our living       different precisions

                                 what we share      illuminates what we do not

                                 the rest is a burden of history

As a matter of technique, it is significant that these are not line breaks; we are asked to feel  that the lines must overcome the breaks to complete their momentum; they are different elements in the same line, suggestive of, but refusing to become, line breaks, insisting on a greater unity than a line break that, in this poem especially, often distinguishes clauses and phrases from one another. They embody, then, a tension within a unity, a refusal to reconcile, and they get into the poem an absence that cannot be harmoniously accommodated in its form. Something does not come together; something remains unresolved; it cannot be made to fit into the poem’s terms. This is at once the resistance of one person to another, and the resistance of casting their relationship into the public form a poem must take. The spaces are themselves “outlines” on the page, of a relationship that cannot be filled in entirely, of lovers who, however well known to one another, must at times be mere outlines, or else be reduced to outlines of their full selves. 

Proceeding through each case, in the space of the break:

1)    The “fossil tears” are handled, picked up, and then “pitched over the heart’s wall | for protection,”

2)    What is given and what is spoken are unnamed, but both are qualified by limitations and at the same time, the absence of an object grants that the acts of giving and speaking themselves contain power in reaching across the space that must exist between lovers.

3)    The lifeless “cement driveway” is a fragment of memory set apart from the harvest in the garden; though they are “together”, they are also “embattled”, and these, the space suggests, cannot be resolved.

4)    The cells (biological, prison) of the past are searched for what is useful, but the past is also stoked by furies, anger and fate.

5)    The organic connotation of “grow” is set against the technological implication of “precise.”

6)    “our weaknesses” were hateful, are no longer hateful, but the space intimates a hesitation of the heart.

7)    The “different precisions” are “what we live,” and the break registers the incompatibility of the grammar, suggests the incompatibility of difference rendered sufficiently precise, while also making such a difference a strength of their living together.

8)    “what we share” is granted its place in the hiatus of the line, but that same break draws attention to what is excluded, as “what we share” “illuminates” the absence of “what we do not.” 

In the hiatus of these lines, the poem’s yearning for unity is reconciled with the necessity of excluding, suppressing, or silencing what cannot, for whatever reason, be made a part of that unity—a true reconciliation because that exclusion is not effaced by the unity but is represented within it. In this movement of the lines, that which is different from the poem is nonetheless admitted into it; a further precision is to be gained, perhaps, or the further precision that has been gained in the intimacy of the relationship has made clear what is incomplete. Such incompletion is, after all, a condition of the erotic; it is the difference of one being and another, the difference of what is and what-is-not which sustains the erotic and which would destroy the erotic along with individual beings were it to be overcome. “If we win | there is no telling” closes the poem, and the last line is ambiguous. It is the colloquial “it is too good to describe,” and it is also a celebration that victory would entail an affirmation and safeguarding of what in experience need not, cannot, be rendered in terms that, because all language is symbolic, must make of difference something that is common to all. Such an unspeakable difference grows out of the recognition of history, of shared struggle; but history is redeemed, and the shared struggle successful, Lorde suggests, only if this difference, recognized, and cherished, but unspoken, issues forth.

In her speech “Difference and Survival,” Lorde returns to the notion that “difference” can and should be a source of creativity at once political and personal. It is all too easy to reduce her arguments to a lax Romanticism of perpetual becoming: one is one thing and, through experience, one takes steps in a life journey that leads to something else, always renewing agency and freedom. This would not be an accurate account of what she says in her prose writing.Though she does speak of the discovery and preservation of difference as creative and freeing, she insists on the hardness and precariousness of the task:

So this is a call for each of you to remember herself and himself, to reach for new definitions of that self, and to live intensely. To not settle for the safety of pretended sameness and the false security that sameness seems to offer. To feel the consequences of who you wish to be, lest you bring nothing of lasting worth because you have withheld some piece of the essential, which is you.

And make no mistake; you will be paid well not to feel, not to scrutinize the function of your differences and their meaning, until it will be too late to feel at all. You will be paid in insularity, in poisonous creature comforts, false securities, in the spurious belief that the midnight knock will always be upon somebody else’s door. But there is no separate survival.

This warns of the threat to difference; “Outlines” feels the menace directly. It is in the fray, but it is also conscious of what it is to be in the fray, expressing both the struggle and the conditions of the struggle:

                                 One straight light hair on the washbasin’s rim

                                 difference      intimate as a borrowed scarf

                                 the children arrogant as mirrors

                                 our pillows’ mingled scent

                                 this grain of our particular days

                                 keeps a fine sharp edge

                                 to which I cling like a banner

                                 in a choice of winds

                                 seeking an emotional language

                                 in which to abbreviate time.

The movement of these lines exemplifies the interweaving of general and specific, symbol and concrete instance, that moves through, and animates, the poem. The abstraction of “difference” transforms, in the hiatus of the line, to become a “borrowed scarf,” “borrowed” because difference is both a marker of oneself, and only expressed in language and signs that belong to others; “borrowed” because a scarf that is borrowed is a token of intimacy, a suggestion that the political recognition of difference arises from intimacy, from the daily exchanges between those who lend and borrow what warms close to the skin; “borrowed” because what warms is the marker of difference that another has allowed one to possess. It is of a piece of a life with shared pillows and their “mingled scent,” among the most private of sensory experiences, the knowledge of the body that pressed on the pillow or was pressed on the pillow. It is not just “the grain of our days” and not the “particular grain of our days” that “keeps a fine sharp edge,” but “the grain of our particular days,” admitting both that some days are particular and others are not, and that each day is particular from others, that to recognize the difference in a person is to recognize the difference of a person in time, and to recognize the difference that time makes and that can be made of time itself, time varying in flavor and texture. “Keeps a fine sharp edge” because it is act of preservation that must be kept, because the grain is sharp like a blade, but, having grain, is wood, is sharp also like wood to be worked and carved; it is the work of a life together. Then the figure of the scarf returns, but not as a scarf—now a banner, which she has become, for she herself clings to the fine sharp edge like a banner, unless of course the fine sharp edge is like a banner to which she clings: either is possible, since she and the time are identical, and what matters most is that the banner is not a scarf, not personal, but a standard and sign for a public: from the difference that is discovered in the intimacy (and the intimate conflicts) of love the difference that is public and political comes to be known. In the phrase “choice of winds,” “choice” accommodates agency within the passivity of a banner fluttering. It is in that “choice of winds” that the “seeking” takes place; and what she seeks is the “emotional language” which could be either a language of emotions or a language expressive of emotions that can “abbreviate time.” This is knotty, but the usual abbreviations of time, the usual ways of marking the difference of days and years are numerical or nominal, naming one day Monday, another Friday. What is sought is instead a language that can describe and account and compare the difference of days to do justice to the differences of the self that are constituted by time’s passage. But “abbreviate” also aspires to a language that can shorten time, that can, as the poem does (perhaps it is the “emotional language”), compress time’s passage so that the accumulation of time’s difference can be communicated, contained, as it otherwise cannot be, remaining beyond language. The banner, meaning something in its public display, cannot mean all of this—and so the movement from the personal scarf to the public banner has one final step left, something that, in its public being, can make commonly known, and public knowledge, the essence of time’s difference, allowing it to enter into the political arena and to have a place in whatever future comes to be. It might be that the poem itself is this third object, reconciling the banner and the scarf, the private and the public, the common symbols of language and the idiosyncratic difference of personal experience. 

 --By Owen Boynton