From the start of “Poetry Is Not a Luxury”, Audre Lorde is including herself in her audience by using the word ‘we’: “we scrutinize… we form… we learn.” She’s narrowing down her audience by her language; if a reader doesn’t have anything in common with Lorde, then you’re already not her intended audience. So we ask ourselves who her intended audience is and she answers it right away: “us as women.” Again using one word, Lorde has specified her audience as women and, throughout the passage, she continues to speak of women, to speak of us and we. She only refers to herself as “I” in three simple sentences; this omission of referring to herself alone connects her to the audience and gives them a sense of who they should be: a woman, maybe black, and maybe a lesbian (all like Lorde).
Lorde uses imagery of light and dark throughout the passage in order to better narrow down her overall intended audience: black women. She equates the idea of being a poet, what she wants a reader to become, by calling the poet within each of us the “Black mother”. This further narrows her audience: to be a mother, you must be a woman, and to have that Black mother within you, you are black. One may argue against that idea, but Lorde says that the Black mother “whispers in our dreams”; this use of our again shows how she encompasses herself in the audience, and since she is a black woman, she is reaching out to the readers that are also black women. This shows us how Lorde has gone from the general audience, people, to one specific, women, to another, black women. She is rallying the women like her, those that she knows are being oppressed because she is living that same life, to live out their dreams in poetry and “feel… [to] be free.”
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