Politics and Poetry

January 2, 2008

A snippet from a newspaper article on Lawrence Ferlinghetti:

“Poetry can save the world by transforming consciousness,” he argues in “Poetry as Insurgent Art,” a slim hardback pocketbook manifesto of prose epigrams, seemingly addressed to poets and those who might be.

“I am signaling you through the flames,” he begins in the new section from which his book takes its title. “The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.” Poetry, in this vision, must be a political statement, arrows slung for freedom of expression, thought and resistance. “Write living newspapers,” he counsels. “Your poems must be more than want ads for broken hearts” - in other words, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, to write mere “love poetry” in such times is “almost a crime.” So “challenge capitalism masquerading as democracy”; “Liberate have-nots and enrage despots”; “Don’t cater to the Middle Mind of America nor to consumer society.” And so on, in variations of his admonition to “be committed to something outside yourself.”

I understand Ferlinghetti’s sentiment, but political poetry– by which I mean poetry written to make a political point– is usually so bad. Overtly political poems often share most of the attributes of ordinary bad poetry with a slathering of jingoistic rhetoric. When something becomes obviously ideological it stops being poetry. We’ve seen it in scores of mediocre political poems (not to mention poems by politicians). I don’t need more of those.

And then there is the avant garde’s infatuation with poems as politics. I think back to a piece written by K. Silem Mohammed comparing poems by Martha Moxley and Billy Collins. His conclusion:

And it is ultimately this that signals the greatest difference between the two poems. One expresses a relatively conscious set of relations to life within the contradictions of late capitalism, and the other blithely shrugs the contradictions off and gloats. Form comes into the equation only as a necessary adjunct to the reigning emotional timbre of each poem: in the one case, an uneasy apprehension of one’s tenuous position in a booby-trapped system, and in the other, a narcotized sugar-coating of bad faith, complete with anthropomorphic Disney candles.

rubbed me wrong then and it still does because of the very plain assumption that a poem needs to engage in a specifically political engagement (let’s not get lost in the rabbit-hole of seeing every act, even acts of omission, as political– I’m assuming a reference frame of intentionality here.

Billy Collins isn’t intrinsically a bad man unless Kasey likewise is given that Kasey is a (presumably) middle- to upper-middle class, well-educated University professor… Kasey is excoriating Collins for writing a poem reflective of a life that, to a large extent, he apparently shares. Nor is making a poem that is interesting and evocative enough. The poetry must be political. Collins isn’t merely writing a poem that is spolitical, he is (to paraphrase) gloating in narcotize, sugar-coated words. He isn’t writing something that is simply other than a rumination about the “booby-trapped system” he must– he must– be actively shrugging it off and implicitly denying the existence of the system. This would be a completely stultifying philosophy of poetics were it not for the fact that these kinds of accusations seem limited to times of convenience… when favored poets write poems that are apolitical it passes by without notice.

I’m not quibbling with the notion that an important part of the cutting-edge’s conception of poetry involves politics on multiple levels. I do maintain that a lot of the poetry created in that mode suffers because, as part of one level of political act, it unwisely dispenses with some of the methods that make poetry interesting and important in the first place. I (perhaps in error) feel that I’m typical of a pretty large group of readers and I have to wonder if an aesthetically satisfying political poetry is even possible. Maybe it’s better to engage in politics in other, more direct ways… because when it comes to political poems the choice seems to be between the obvious and the incomprehensible, or the unintentionally or intentionally artless.

Tags: poetics, poetry, politics