What Poetry Can and Cannot Do:
Political Poems for Our Times
“Poetry means nothing if it merely decorates the dinner table of the power that holds it hostage,” Adrienne Rich wrote in her letter to President Clinton in July 1997 when she turned down the National Medal of the Arts — the same medal that Maya Angelou received from President Obama a lifetime later. Not surprisingly, the US Medal of the Arts has not been awarded to anyone since 2023.
Audre Lorde, Meridel Leseur, and Adrienne Rich in Austin, Texas where they led a poetry workshop, 1980. What a wokshop it must have been.
South African President Nelson Mandela famously said “Poetry cannot block a bullet or still a sjambok, but it can bear witness to brutality-thereby cultivating a flower in a graveyard.” I borrowed this quote when I applied for my Fulbright Fellowship to South Africa where I wanted to investigate the poetry of protest — South Africans who had written during the anti-Apartheid movement of primarily the 1970’s and 80’s.Poets such as Jeremy Cronin, Ingrid de Kok, Zakes Mda, Mazizi Kunene, Wally Serote and many others. I was fascinated.
Now, decades later, I am “back home” seeing my own country under siege. In the month of January, two American citizens were gunned down in broad daylight in Minneapolis, Minnesota—a city hitherto known for down home midwestern hospitality and as the birthplace of Prince. For years, I taught a class on the history and literature of the Holocaust. The years leading up to the final solution, look remarkably like what we are living through now.
Two weeks ago, I did something I had never done before. I wrote a poem from beginning to end in two days; a broken sonnet in response to a national tragedy. A poem I thought was only for me. I wrote in the wake of Alex Pretti’s death at the hands of ICE. Something we saw happen on a cold Saturday morning in Minneapolis. Sunday night I decided to submit this piece to One Art: A Journal of Poetry on the chance that they might publish it. As a fully online journal, One Art can move quickly.
Can a poem offer solace to a community? Can a few thoughtful lines calm a life? Alter the course of American history? Probably not. And yet poetry is what we look to in times of crisis. After September 11th, the New Yorker Magazine, published “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” by Adam Zagajewski.
I also think of William Yeat’s poems “The Second Coming” and Elizabeth Alexander’s poem, “Praise Song for the Day.” I think of Ross Gay’s poem “A Small Needful Fact,” and Maggie Smith’s poem, “Good Bones,” and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s poem “Running Orders” — all poems that spoke in the immediate wake of trauma but that also endure over years, decades.
These poems rise up from my subconscious unbidden during hard times. The power of the work continues on as documents of our times. All of these fall under the heading of documentary poetry. These works are also among my favorite poems written in the 21st century. They matter on an emotional register as well as a historical.
I don’t want to pretend that the poem I wrote last month has the same staying power. All I know is that these poems that come unbidden, out of great pain, matter.
As a working poet, the poems I’ve written about my human rights work in Bosnia Herzegovina, or Gaza and the West Bank, or post Apartheid South Africa are among the poems I’m happiest to have written.
I’ll leave you with “Broken Sonnet” with my deep gratitude to Marc Danowsky, founding editor of One Art and fellow Elizabeth Bishop fan.
