SOURCE: "Living on the Line: Audre Lorde and Our Dead Behind Us," in Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, edited by Cheryl A. Wall, Rutgers University Press, 1989, pp. 150-72.

In the essay below, Hull conducts a broad appraisal of the themes and issues Lorde addresses in her poetry.

In Audre Lorde's poem "A Meeting of Minds," a woman who "stands / in a crystal" is not permitted to dream ("the agent of control is / a zoning bee") or to speak ("her lips are wired to explode / at the slightest conversationsation"), although around her, "other women are chatting."

 the walls are written in honey
in the dream
she is not allowed
to kiss her own mother
the agent of control
is a white pencil
that writes
alone. 

Denied access to her sleeping consciousness, this heroine cannot see her past or future, nor can...