The First Cities

Audre Lorde's 1968 debut poetry collection

Tradition: Black-feminist poetics / African-American literary tradition / lesbian-feminist literature

Lorde's 1968 debut poetry collection — 'The First Cities'

Published by Poets Press in 1968 with a foreword by Diane di Prima (the poet and editor of the small-press scene that would become Poets Press), 'The First Cities' is Audre Lorde's debut poetry collection. The book gathers 24 short lyric poems composed across 1959-1968, the years during which Lorde — born in 1934 to Caribbean-immigrant parents in Harlem, educated at the Hunter College of the City University of New York (BA 1959) and at Columbia (MLS 1961) — was working as a librarian and beginning to find her poetic voice. The poems are stylistically distinctive in their early form: shorter lines and tighter rhythmic-imagistic compression than the longer-line, more rhetorically expansive poems of Lorde's later books ('From a Land Where Other People Live' 1972, 'The Black Unicorn' 1978, 'Our Dead Behind Us' 1986). Themes include: urban-Harlem childhood and adolescence; the experience of being read as Caribbean in African-American Harlem and as African-American in the broader American context; early intimations of the Black-lesbian-feminist consciousness that would become Lorde's mature position; the relations between motherhood and politics (Lorde's first child Beth had been born in 1963, second child Jonathan in 1964). The book attracted very little attention at the time (small-press poetry collections in 1968 were genuinely small-press); Lorde's emergence as a major American poetic voice would not occur until the mid-1970s. But the collection is foundational: it records the beginning of one of the major late-twentieth-century American poetic voices and the formative period of Lorde's poetic-political work.