I have never been more creatively or spiritually fulfilled than I was for the few brief years when my biggest weekly priority was an academically rigorous poetry workshop. Still, I gave up the practice as soon as I graduated college, realizing that sticking with it would mean a life-long professional dedication to academia, something I had no interest in pursuing. I was fondly reminded of those days while watching the documentary A Litany for Survival, though, which features several scenes of its subject—activist-poet Audre Lorde—running a poetry workshop at Hunter College in New York City. She’s tough on her students’ work in a productive, fully engaged way that you can see improving their art in real time. Other formidable poets like Adrienne Rich & Sonia Sanchez appear in interviews to reminisce about how Lorde improved their own work through a similar kind of collaborative criticism, pushing them to sharpen their ideas through revision. It’s difficult to write meaningfully without that kind of peer-to-peer friction, which is largely why I gave up on the medium of poetry entirely to work on this silly movie blog instead. And that’s not even taking into account how increasingly niche & insular the world of poetry has continued to become in recent decades. Anyone who’s still out there making a full life out of that kind of work is superheroic, since this 90s-era documentary already feels like a time machine trip back to the last moment it was considered societally Important in any way.
Audre Lorde was tough on everyone: her students, her colleagues, her children, her nation, herself. Which is to say that she continuously fought for a better world the entire time she was alive, applying her skill for ruthless revision to societal structures the same way she applied it to her own poetry, through political activism causes like Civil Rights, Gay Rights, and Feminism. She billed herself as a “Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet,” rising to prominence in the literary world in the 1960s & 70s, when those identity markers had a real-life chance to either get you killed or change the world. Her writing and her activism were both heavily fixated on Intersectionality, drilling down into the particulars of what made her a distinct social outsider while also seeking commonality among comrades who were fighting similar struggles. By the time documentarians Michelle Parkerson & Ada Gay Griffin told her life story in the 1990s, she had shifted to fighting a very different fight: battling cancer instead of oppression. A Litany for Survival is a very straight-forward, made-for-PBS style production, but it took nearly a decade to complete, so a significant chunk of the footage features Lorde wheezing through her final days while suffering from lung cancer, no longer able to perform her poems with her usual fierceness. Thankfully, they were around for her healthier days too, when she could still provoke & incite with the best of ’em.
In both form & content, the movie Litany most reminded me of was the more recent documentary Going to Mars: The Nikki Giovanni Project. Giovanni occupied such a similar place in American literature that Litany only passingly references her by her first name, “Nikki”, since you presumably already know who she is if you’re watching this profile of her contemporary. Both films exceed their limitations as PBS-style documentary profiles of activist-poets by drifting through different phases of their lives instead of strictly following a linear birth-to-death biography. We meet Lorde in her final years of illness, when she can barely speak. Earlier, more forceful interviews about her life story then mix with audiobook readings of her prose autobiography Zami, live readings of her most iconic poems, and candid domestic scenes shared with loved ones in the final decade of her life. None of these conversations or monologues feel complete in representation; the edit crossfades between them like overlapping waves, illustrating the images evoked by Lorde’s past with still photographs from her personal albums and vintage NYC stock footage. It’s a full life retold in out-of-context snippets, with the only incomplete element being that we never see the world through Lorde’s own handheld camcorder, which she points around her home garden in her final days as a new way to capture images for her art.
A newly restored version of A Litany for Survival recently saw its local premiere at the Patois Film Festival, screening at the Joan Mitchell Center instead of the fest’s usual home at The Broad. That venue choice was . . . suboptimal for appreciating what the new scan might have offered as a pure sensory experience, but it did contribute to my personal nostalgia for college-level poetry workshops. It was projected onto a scuffed-up screen that unrolled from the ceiling; every shifting body in the packed room’s hard-backed chairs could be acutely heard & felt; and the presentation concluded with a panel discussion about how Lorde’s work was an effective form of political activism. It was a perfect simulation of a college classroom environment, like a VR headset experience of what it might be like to have Audre Lorde sit across a workshop table from you, pushing you to do better work and to make a better world. I’m still not convinced that I should quit my desk job and enroll in grad school just because I miss participating in those workshops for real (if not only because the guaranteed outcome would be me getting another desk job after graduating, with only more debt to show for it), but it was a pure pleasure to return to that headspace, and it made for an easy argument that Lorde improved the life & work of everyone she ever collaborated with.
-Brandon Ledet
PATOIS Film Festival Selections at The Broad
Swampflix 