“The Uses of Anger” for BIPOC Poets

As a poet and teaching artist, my goal is to create more communal spaces of storytelling and social justice for BIPOC folks. I welcome poets of all levels to my workshops, with a special emphasis on beginners and those who have never written any poems at all. I ask myself and my students, if we don’t tell our own stories, then who will? For BIPOC folks, poetry is an act of social justice and healing.

This pedagogy guides the way that I teach my writing workshops, including my generative poetry workshop through the Forms & Features program for the Poetry Foundation. The workshop was titled “The Uses of Anger”: Writing Our Wellness With Love, Rage, and Healing,” and I drew on the work of BIPOC poets like Audre Lorde and June Jordan to explore the institutional and interpersonal dimensions of love, rage, and healing through a social justice framework. I believe that this inner work of healing can strengthen relationships within ourselves, each other, and our communities. 

I began the workshop by sharing an emotion wheel, a visual tool developed by psychologists to facilitate a greater understanding of our emotions. I discussed how everyone is born with the inherent capacity to feel the same core emotions, such as fear, sadness, joy, disgust, and anger. Although we all share these core emotions, I emphasized that emotional intelligence is a skill that is learned over time. And what better way to learn than poetry?

In this particular workshop, I choose to focus on the emotion of anger because BIPOC poets need our anger in the face of contemporary and historical injustice. Our anger will not be stigmatized or silenced. At this point in the workshop, I turned to Audre Lorde’s quote: “Anger is loaded with information and energy.” Lorde embraced her queer Black feminist anger as a tool against racism. In fact, she argues that our feelings are “our most genuine paths to knowledge.”

We then turned to June Jordan’s poem, “Poem about My Rights.” The participants discussed how the poem is imbued with the energy of anger, which is especially palpable when the speaker states that she has “been wrong the wrong sex the wrong age/the wrong skin the wrong nose the wrong hair.” By the end of the poem, the speaker asserts:

I am not wrong: Wrong is not my name
My name is my own my own my own
and I can’t tell you who the hell set things up like this
but I can tell you that from now on my resistance
my simple and daily and nightly self-determination
may very well cost you your life.

Prompt: “How has anger activated your own self-determination, survival, and healing? Why is ‘wrong’ not your name?” Allow yourself to free flow into the anger and receive the information and energy that it offers you. Anger is a gift, too.

We then read Audre Lorde’s poem, “Power.” The speaker opens the poem by stating:

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

Prompt: “What is the difference between poetry and rhetoric for you?” As demonstrated in this poem, the stakes are incredibly high for BIPOC folks because our anger is always politicized. For the speaker in the poem, she must know “the difference between poetry and rhetoric” because it is a matter of life and death. As you write, allow anger to show you her face. See her, feel her, love her. This is a sacred, ancestral dialogue.

Ultimately, in this workshop and beyond, I embrace the ways that the power of poetics and BIPOC anger is a portal to love, healing, and resistance. Let’s fully feel our feelings. To me, that is freedom.