political poetry

A Lesson in Political Poetry, Guest Post by Jennifer Met

Jennifer Met

A Lesson in Political Poetry

Looking for things to revise in my folder of old, unpublished poems, I came across this poem I wrote in early 2017. After all that has happened in 2020, it is eerily prescient. Yes, I remember writing the poem, but reading it with current eyes startles me—it is like reading someone else’s words. It has moved from the safe realm of hypothetical to a place that reads as diary—personal, confessional, present. It is unreal to me how it is no longer just me but someone else’s truth—a true microcosm. Here is the poem:

Thanks to the Children

Thanks to the children, I have another

cold today. Hacking a yellow smell

like clogged drains, my head swimming

like summer asphalt. Another cold, this

constant parade. Spring and it returns

with the tulips—was never truly dead

but just lingering. Hand sanitizer empty

and of course I never touch my face,

even to check for sadness. Never hide

coquettish, never blow kisses, never mock

mustache. People don’t trust men

with facial hair, I tell the President,

who knows this, but somehow not

schoolyard physics. Let’s form a line,

he says instead. Like a recess game,

clasping hands and daring the other side

to send Johnny right over—let’s hold

hands across America. So close, pore to pore,

our sweat with nowhere to go, permeating

each grasp. Forget the states on the flag

are in constellation only—ionic bonds. Forget

that the country air is so sweet in effect

because it’s free—a space between

the fingers. How easily a wire fence slips

or is circumvented here where we live

and let live. In the red, where roads

aren’t paved. Just a suggestion—

but forget immanent influenzas, stealthy

infections. A wall cannot keep out the birds,

cousins of air, I press. No, he says, ignore

Avian Flu, Smallpox outbreaks. It isn’t

part of our America. Not part of my agenda.

Says the man without looking at his planner.

Great! Only it’s hard to ignore this growing tickle

at the back of my throat. The way fear becomes

an interminable barking—to no effect. President

already turning, the air between constituents

growing. Gaps between atoms expanding in heat—

the space between us a molecule’s width

instead of half. You’re covered. Go back

to the game of Red Rover. But…I cough in alarm.

Cough. I cannot stop. I cannot stop it. But…

I steel myself, know that children pick up

on panic. That for every breath I take of theirs,

they are inhaling mine—this air we share. Coughing,

the heavy heart in my throat’s cavern throbbing

to ear. Don’t listen, I whisper. To myself,

my daughter, my son. A cold now and then

makes us stronger. We need air to survive. But

through muffled stink ear a voiceless fear

floats. Neighbor standing with neighbor—isn’t it

Great? Don’t worry. We’ve got it covered.

Refill the hand sanitizer and just forget

the children about your knees—how quickly

ignorance can piggyback an innocent touch.

These were my notes when submitting this poem to a current event poetry feature in April 2017:

“I live in a remote 800 person town in the “red state” of Idaho and generally avoid discussing politics. But in poetry circles you hear a lot about Trump’s wall. You hear a lot about his proposed budget cuts to the arts and increase to national defense. But what about other areas of his budget plan or his health related administrative appointments? Worrying about the recent Smallpox outbreaks in the Czech Republic due to the trends of parents not vaccinating their children, I came across this article https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-trump-administration-is-ill-prepared-for-a-global-pandemic/2017/04/08/59605bc6-1a49-11e7-9887-1a5314b56a08_story.html?utm_term=.e8d1945eb285 pointing out the unpreparedness in the current administration for a pandemic outbreak of infectious disease. Yikes, as if “Dawn of the Dead” and Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” weren’t already giving me nightmares.”

Why am I sharing this now? As a way to say “I told you so?” Ha. Maybe a little bit—especially with the “no touching your eyes, nose and face” bit. That has always been my rule—one that my family would just not take seriously. Is it because I am becoming more overtly political in our country’s current state of crisis? Yes, I think this is maybe my personal “coming out” celebration. But much more importantly, I think this poem holds a crucial lesson for the future (mine, yours, ours, theirs): this poem was rejected and that was that.

This poem was rejected and I only submitted it to a few places before it fell out of my rotation and I never felt it good enough to even try to revise further. (Honestly, I’m embarrassed sharing it). Of course, it isn’t the strongest poem I’ve ever written, but in retrospect I wish I had believed in it more. I am taking this as a reminder, both as a writer and an editor, to look for poetry that matters. Even if it isn’t the best writing, there is something admirable in a force of conviction, something imperative in an idea. I should have worked on this poem.

Another lesson—important poetry is timely. This poem is now out of date. I used to think that a good poem had to be timeless. Because of this I would spend years refining each poem. But some of my best poems missed their moment. I have always believed that poetry is firmly rooted in time and even “classic” poetry reflects the era in which it was created. But what I didn’t realize is that this feeling of time is compressed for current poetry—it is often easy to tell if a poem is a year or two out of date. This is a lesson to write timely poetry intensely, quickly, and go with it. Work hard, not long. I will still let things set for a month to read with a fresh eye, but I will no longer let doubt rule my voice.

I feel, now more than ever, that poetry has a duty to be more than beautiful or entertaining. Responsive poetry has the ability and job to invoke standards of social justice. I wonder how many poems have made a reader stop to think. I wonder if a poem would have given emotional credence to the Washington Post’s journalism article—made it stick, made people recognize the importance of such words and work harder for change. And I wonder how many unpublished poems could have made a difference.

Reading my old poem’s ending, I am ashamed. I chose to ignore revising and submitting this poem. Took an easy way out due to fear. Spent time with my kids instead. How ironic. I wasn’t very political, especially in vocally pressing issues with which I privately disagreed. Especially in not realizing how an issue holding personal significance can quickly affect us all—how public policy isn’t just a wall somewhere, but here. And now. And coming for you.

So I am making this public promise to be better—to fight for social justice of all kinds and not just write, or think, pretty nature poems. Poetry is a medium of communication and all writing is political. We can and must speak up, and, to do that, we must stick with things that we know will matter—now and in all hypothetical futures.

Guest Post, Philip Gross: Beyond Yes or No

Philip Gross

Philip Gross HeadshotIt seems so long ago now: Brexit, the British equivalent of America’s Trump moment.  By a similar slight tipping of an almost equally divided electorate, that necessary legal fiction called The British People chose to leave the European Union.

What the fiction concealed was a polity more split than ever, and with no wish to reconcile… not to mention the widening cracks between the four countries of the British union, the United Kingdom, or between regions of England itself.

As for the Yes/No question – making it so simple, you would think – that concealed complexities that would not have fitted on ten sides of ballot paper, let alone that one tick-box. Whichever way you voted, you’d been trying to ignore the fact that half your allies looked for all the world like enemies. Even one word, Yes or No, seemed like the answer, in each voter’s mind, to a whole array of different questions. Were you saying No, or Yes, to complicated bureaucratic legislation… or to globalisation… or to bloody foreigners… or to a gallant attempt to heal the fractiousness of a continent prone to internecine wars?

That was nine months ago – time for something, or at least some understanding, to have come to birth.

Some fifty years ago, I stumbled on the unappealing-sounding The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. I do care about science, but what it suggested, eye-openingly, was more. It concerned how we change. Why is it that we don’t change smoothly, incrementally, as we gain more information? Largely we don’t, not individuals any more than nations; we move in jolts and lurches, with ideas seeming to seize power in sudden coups.

Kuhn’s insight was that we live in a matrix of information, some of it fitting our current account of things, any things not. In newer terms, we think we know what is the signal, what is noise. We live with the freight of things we tell ourselves might be an error, or irrelevant, or just waiting to be better explained next week. Then one day, someone says What if that’s not the story? What if the exceptions are the story, in the margins of the page?

In Britain’s Brexit moment, we heard a blare of noise. The fact that it was being organised into a cruder, nastier and falser story is not the point. The howl of hurt unfocussed rage, of whole neighbourhoods, whole regions who saw no place for them in the current story, the yearning to uncomplicate things, violently, was going to be heard.

Was it a feeble response then, from some of us stunned by a genuine grief, to pick up our pen or laptop and write poetry? In my case, not even political poetry, not continuing the argument by other means, because my paradigm-shifting moment said: Maybe it’s the story of Yes/No that’s the problem, which we have to get beyond.

Alphabets are how young children come to language. A is for Apple, and so on. Trying to see what it was I felt such grief at losing, I found myself spelling out an alphabet of Europe, in the poem here. It contains some close-up details of European history that rarely feature in the headline stories, but that’s part of the point. Brexit barely features. The letters spelled out a wider story – of Europe already much more various than we tend to think, Europe now reeling at the impact of an age of population shift, of continents spilling, leaking great migrations. (This is not new. It’s the periods of apparent stasis that are the exceptions.) With migrant boats sinking offshore, we were struggling to be the Europe those desperate people dreamed, and we hoped, we might be. We needed to be bigger, in heart and practicality. Instead, nation by nation started backing into fear and defensiveness, into our smaller selves and stories of the way things used to be.

No, poetry is not the answer. It might look towards a better question, one that’s wider, deeper, than the Yes/No story. So few words, such a slight art form. Still, it points a way to being more.

 

               Trying to Spell Europe

                          

Armistice: for a minute or two, we understand each other. Silence. Then the

harder part, a life’s work: language must step in.

 

Banlieux: the writing in the margins of the city. Dark illumination. Yes, and we

will need to read it before we can understand ourselves.

 

Calais: the lost thing that inscribed itself not only on one dead queen’s heart but

thousands, where it translates into any home or hope.

 

Danube: not to forget, there is this other river that shapes half of Europe, that

concentrates its melancholy in the (what else?) Black Sea.

 

E-numbers are a way of knowing, that’s all. Of perceiving what our tongues can’t

tell. Did we think Brussels hid them, microscopic numbers in our food?

 

Frisian: the language most germane to English, of a country on and not on any

map, its heartland those long islands, barely more than shifting dunes.

 

Gross: allow me, please, this little word for Big; not just because it’s mine. Because it’s here.

Because it feels, in its bones, the swash of centuries.

 

Hanseatic: now, there was an empire – without borders, without army. Gabled

houses, and the weighing out of herring shoals, their scales, their silver.

 

Indigenous: for us, the word is affectation, scarcely old enough for habit. It’s no

time at all since the first stragglers happened on a house swept bare by ice.

 

John, Johann, Jean: three guys, three guises of J on our tongues, slipping from one

set of taste buds to another, as in a wine tasting: rinse, spit, taste again.

 

Kick out the Ks, unsettling letters. Tolerable when accompanied, as at each end of

knock. They are the crackling of boots through Northern, Eastern, forest dark.

 

Lulled, on the other hand, by languid sounds of Languedoc (disregard the silenced

voice in that word too) as if L was a lingua franca we could speak.

 

Médecins Sans Frontières, there’s a clue: not that our wounded borders are in need

of healing, but that borders are themselves the wound.

 

Nation: a shape that casts its shadow in the light of something other – maybe the

glare of empire; also the tiny candle of a stranger in the corner of the room.

 

Overseas is a word that comes too easily to islanders. Offshore (yes, with its stain

these days of dodgy dealings), that may be more to the point.

 

Pétanque, pelota, pesäpallo: we should give some time to other people’s games.

Not to compete, just listen to the tunk or whap against the wall next door.

 

Q’ran: he’s learned to write it; it disturbs him still, that letter abroad without its U,

old rules unput, and the sound of its catch in the throat.

 

Renaissance, Reformation, Risorgimento: it seems we never make a move without

the prefix glancing back at what was lost before.

 

Stars in too snug a circle on their blue-sky flag? As we know, it’s only where we’re

standing, looking, that makes any constellation hold.

 

Tundra crisping the Northward edges of our vision. And the South wind on the

windscreen with its gauze of desert sand. Both these define us.

 

Urals: there’s a skyline, and a far one, but why should this crimp in a landmass

make a continent, unless it mirrors some crimp in our minds?

 

Volte face or viva voce or (in acclamation) viva anything… From now, there’ll be

examinations on the border, to turn the voice back, though it only wants to live.

 

West is the wall we’re backed against, with, we would like to think, the setting

sun. Then it too takes ship, off, out. Leaves us standing on the shore.

 

X is that otherness, that and the Z, Basque shows us. As if any easy kinship was

being nixed. It’s a cross in the box, but no one tells us what the question is.

 

Yogh: that Saxon letter, never travelled, still leaves its guttural trace on our Y, a

shadow on each clumsy impulse towards Yes and You.

 

Zero, now, and zenith… Zodiac. I could go on. Wherever did you lay your hands

on words like these, their smell of spice route, alcázar, bazaar?