Audre Lorde’s First Published Poem
She was sixteen. The faculty advisor read it twice, called it bad—conflating spring and fear was too much—tubers pushing up from below, unasked, green and sodden with wild grief. The advisor meant it did not scan, was too girlish, and rejected it for the school magazine.
Lorde wrote, The voice from out the earth cannot be stilled, and mailed it anyway. Published in the April 1951 issue of Seventeen amid cotton dresses and gloss. Instructions on how to smile for boys and make your hair behave.
She needed that rejection. It was a delusion. And now—in the half-light of nostalgia and auction websites—the April 1951 issue sells for hundreds or more in excellent condition plus shipping. But not for Lorde. Not for the poem.
Collectors of vintage ads for girls’ stockings and underwear drive the price. The poem rides along buried the way girls are buried—without ceremony or guilt.
The poem has no resale value. A whispered curse inside the magazine’s silk drawer.
A long time ago, a girl was also afraid and brave. She wrote to you, If the green turmoil could leave my soul at rest.
Copyright © 2026 by Christian Teresi. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 13, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Audre Lorde is a poet I deeply admire. I learned she published her first poem at sixteen in the April 1951 issue of Seventeen. Hoping to own a copy of the original magazine, I set an eBay alert. When copies became available, they sold for hundreds of dollars. I first assumed collectors valued Lorde’s literary debut, until I noticed listings carefully describing the issue’s advertisements of teenage girls modeling stockings and underwear. The poem arrived from that unsettling discovery of a major poet’s earliest work circulating as incidental material within an obscene collectors’ market.”
—Christian Teresi
Christian Teresi
