Tag Archives: politics

Why write poetry now?

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A Blog Post                                                                                                                                                                    by Ina Roy-Faderman

In the two months before the US midterm elections, I stopped writing poetry. In fact, I stopped being a poet, with all that implies beyond writing: participating in panels, providing poetry workshops to local kids, assisting in online poetic projects. In the welter of day jobs, parenting, day-to-day “women’s work,” and pacifying the machine that keeps my chronic illness under control, I felt that I couldn’t add anything else. Given the potential impact of the midterm elections, and the fact that I can no longer pull all-nighters, I decided that poetry had to go.

The current state of US politics is damned personal in my household. I’m a birthright citizen. My spouse is Jewish. We’re an interracial couple. My parents were immigrants at a time in which only ten people were allowed into the US from their birth nation each year. My in-laws are gay and were only able to get married thanks to Gavin Newsom. Basically, we’re the kind of family a small, currently-emboldened sub-group of Americans would like to remove from this country and maybe this planet.

So I stopped writing poetry.  Instead, I engaged in the political activities which so many middle-aged women are quietly engaged in: calling Congresspersons and emailing Senators, protesting, phone banking and texting, squeezing a few dollars from family budgets to support organizations that stand between us and the mob that seems to be running our country.  Creative writing was even, in a way, involved: I texted potential voters with personal messages and sent postcards of encouragement to far-away blue voters.

But now that the midterms are over, barring ballot counts and recounts working their way through bureaucratic tar, I’ve got a moment to look at the decision I made.  And I am reconsidering the idea that it had to be a choice: writing or activism.

Since 2016, talented, well-known writers have filled the online multiverse with entreaties that and reasons why We Should Continue to Write In These Dangerous Times.  Often, they are fiction writers, not poets — maybe because fiction writers have a direct awareness that the dystopian elements of the political current climate are seeping into writing everywhere. Fiction, after all, has the ability to illuminate and comment, more or less directly, on the ills of our time. In contrast, poetry seems indirect, almost indulgent. Why write poetry now?

After wrestling with the question and with my conscience, I’ve identified three reasons that, for me, writing poetry in these times is not just necessary but right and important.

1. Creativity is a bulwark against authoritarianism

I was recently a panelist at a speculative fiction writer’s convention. Another writer described a science fiction convention that was held in the PRC prior to the advent of the internet. The underlying “ask” from invited American speculative fiction authors: tell us how to do this, because we don’t know how.

Hierarchical cultures and authoritarian political systems stifle creativity. It need not be in the form of a conspiracy or a conscious plan (but see e.g. the UK’s Profanity Act, the PRC’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the USSR’s Glavit). Rather, creativity depends upon individuality and in turn nourishes it.   Through existence and manifestation, creativity subverts external limits placed on individuality, including those of oppressive governments. Creations built of words threaten the foundations of authoritarian systems, since those systems rely on people believing that the world is “as it is told to us.” Tell a different story, and the imposed system is no longer a given, “just the way things are.” As poet-activist Francisco X. Alarcón has said, “Poets question dogmas, notions taken for granted, and speak ‘truths’ that defy the ruling order of things.”

We don’t have to live in a formally authoritarian government for poetry to illuminate the limitations of narratives supported by people in power. Against an apparent, militaristic threat to the US’ European allies, WWI soldiers exhibited both strength and heroism, characteristics we admire and promote. But e.e. cummings’s poem, “’i sing of Olaf glad and big,” reminds us that there are other incompatible, but equally moral, stances to be taken by those drawn into war.

2. Poetry is community

Community is at the heart of activism. When our actions are motivated by the needs of more than ourselves, we are activists working with and for a community.

Inherent in the use of language is a presumed audience. When we create with words, we are presuming that we are not alone –- that the possibility of communion with an audience exists.  In creating with words, we both assume and create community.

Poetry, as a creation of words, is founded on the knowledge that we can share a vision with another. This sharing is the beginning of a greater understanding of what we might to for others. As poet Sonya Renee Taylor says in an interview in Autostraddle, “…art is an essential element of how we make the messages of activism accessible and how we invite new people into the dialogue and how we open up new minds to the issues. “ By existing, the poem creates an audience-shaped space. The audience enters that space, and a community is born. And the best thing about the space – it can expand as needed. It is an encompassing space, but not a constricting one.

3. Silence = Death

I was fortunate. When “Silence = Death” was coined, I survived. I was a medical student in the San Francisco area when AIDS appeared. People in my community were getting sick, quickly, and we had no idea why. Most healthcare workers — who were not, by and large, personally affected by illness raging through their communities — were still hurting. Doctors were forced to suit up in plastic to comfort beautiful people who were dying. This is not the way to comfort anyone, but it was what we were told we could do.

The community that finally did — that went beyond what we were told we could do — wasn’t largely healthcare workers. Rather, community activists — suffering and watching suffering — refused to stay silent, who refused to stand by while lovers, friends, and neighbors died.

My activism then, such as it was, was small. I held the hands of men in wheelchairs who knew they’d never walk again. I gave blood. I lent my hands in the clinic in which some students refused to work. I came left the clinic and took shifts caring for a dying friend whose parents had left his clothes in a box on the street when he became ill. I acknowledged that there were many other people who were dying with no help at all.

I hadn’t written anything creative since my teens, but I started writing again. It was therapy, an outlet. But at some point, the outpouring became more; it became my hope for conveying to people who were in outside the zone of suffering just what suffering looks like.

To be silent is to allow pain, need, anguish to go unnoticed. For a poet to be silent is not just to silence herself but to let others, those in power, determine what is important and what is not –- who matters and who doesn’t. Poetry balances the scale; in writing it, we say, “We live. We matter.”

The midterms are over, and I have space to breathe. But the long-term work needs to be done, and it won’t get done by short-term actions, no matter how necessary. The people who are close to me, and the people who aren’t but are also fighting for their lives, their identities, their rights to pursue simple peace, are being subject to shock after shock in the US.  And that is not okay. While the last two months required immediate action, I cannot continue to put aside my contribution to longer-range change. I can’t let those who feel no pressure to go into hiding, feel no fear of hate being unleashed against them, live in their quiet, safe bubbles. I will make the time for poetry. I return to poetry to say, “No, you don’t get to look away. Not from me, not from mine, not from people you think don’t matter. We live. We matter.”

 

Ina Roy-Faderman (inafelltoearth.com) teaches college and graduate biomedical ethics and is an associate fiction editor for Rivet Journal and librarian for a school for gifted children.  Her poetry, fiction, interviews, and literary analyses have appeared in The Rumpus, Transition: Poems in the Aftermath (Indolent Books), HIV Here and Now, Inscape, Midwestern Studies in Philosophy and elsewhere.

Indolence, Politics, and the Good Gray Poet, Part 2

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Walt Whitman and Harry Stafford, 1878.

A Blog Post                                                                                                                                                                  by Reuben Gelley Newman

To see the first half of this two-part post, click here.

National context undeniably informs the poetry we create, and America’s conflict and social upheaval during the late 19th century often intersected with Whitman’s personal life and poetry. He tended wounded soldiers in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, bearing witness to the turmoil it unleashed. Readers both lambasted and celebrated his overtly hetero- and homo-erotic poems, which inspired British intellectuals to advocate for acceptance of homosexuals in the 1870s and 80s. Although he outwardly denied any homosexuality, he had relationships with men almost 40 years younger than him, including George and Susan Stafford’s son, Harry, whom Whitman met at a printing shop. (There’s an obvious power imbalance considering the age gap and Whitman’s cultural status, and it’s impossible to tell exactly how equitable the relationship was. From letters, it seems like it was relatively consensual, if tumultuous, but we should probably still be skeptical.)

Drawing on these rich and complex experiences, he wrote obviously political poems, such as his elegies for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and “O Captain, My Captain.” His erotic poems, including the famous homoerotic “Calamus” ones, were also socially conscious in their disregard for Victorian prudishness. But his expressions of indolence — particularly during his time at the Staffords’ farm in southern New Jersey —  can hardly be political, right?

I’m not so sure. Today, I don’t feel as if “indolent” poems, or poems that express joy more broadly, get all that much traction in the poetry market. (Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and Chen Chen’s When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities seem like exceptions to this.) But reading Specimen Days, I wonder if indolence, in the sense of “love of ease,” can be a counterpart to and part of the political.

For poets from marginalized backgrounds, or even for Whitman — who, as I said in Part 1, was disabled later in life, though hardly “marginalized” — perhaps writing openly about pure joy or indolence could be empowering. Recall the definition of “indolent” that reads “free from pain.” Freedom from pain, of course, is virtually impossible for any human to experience, and that kind of indolence might be even rarer for marginalized poets. Still, “Indolent” writing could serve as an important contrast to taut, emotional poems that explore political situations or recount injustices against the speaker. It could also simply exist by itself. Although it’s important to be aware of the political, no one has to write “political” poetry. It’s a political choice to write a “nature poem,” say, whatever that is — but it’s not necessarily a bad choice.

And that brings us back to Indolent Books. As Michael said, “indolent” refers to some of our “slowly progressing” poets. (Although not all of them are slowly progressing—take Logan February, who has published two chapbooks and whose first full-length collection is coming out next year!) But Indolent’s mission is also strikingly political. Look no further than our online projects What Rough Beast and HIV Here & Now, and our mission statement:

Ultimately, Indolent publishes books the editors care about. The main criteria are that the work be innovative, provocative, risky, and relevant. Indolent is queer flavored but inclusive and maintains a commitment to diversity among  authors, artists, designers, developers, and other team members.

Does this political mission mesh with the historical definitions of “indolent” I’ve discussed? I don’t know. What I do know is that “indolent” and “political” poetry have coexisted for centuries, since well before our good gray poet. As Whitman realized, literature can be an escape, a fantasy, and a utopia: a place free from pain. But his optimistic vision of America was also grounded in political reality. I think such grounding is deeply necessary for poets, both personally and collectively. We need not be optimistic, of course; our poems can turn grief into anger. But whatever our viewpoint, through writing our own hurt and our nation’s, we might begin to free ourselves of pain.

 

In addition to interning here at Indolent, where he edits the blog, Reuben Gelley Newman is an undergraduate at Swarthmore College. His work appears in Alexandria Quarterly, What Rough Beast, and HIV Here & Now, and is forthcoming in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, 2nd Edition.

Indolence, Politics, and the Good Gray Poet, Part 1

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A Blog Post                                                                                                                                                                    by Reuben Gelley Newman

I’m here to talk about indolence — not just your typical laziness, idleness, or slothfulness, but indolence. The adjective “indolent” derives from the prefix “in” and the Latin word “dolens,” meaning “hurting,” “suffering,” or “grieving.” In the 18th and 19th centuries, an indolent ulcer or tumor was “painless” (OED), and, seemingly, that morphed into Merriam Webster’s current definition of “slow to develop or heal.” But since the same period, “indolent” has also described humans: “averse to exertion or toil”; “slothful, lazy, idle” (OED). Why, then, is it the name of our press?

Michael Broder told me he “often used it to mean something like moving at a relaxed pace.” He applies the idea of “slowly progressing” to poets: writers who, for whatever reason, take a longer time with their poetry than many — and, possibly even because of that, produce excellent work.

Interestingly, the noun form of indolent has other connotations, including the more positive “love of ease,” and, in obsolete meanings, “freedom from pain,” and “a state of rest or ease, in which neither pain nor pleasure is felt” (OED). And here’s where “the good, gray poet” of American democracy, Walt Whitman, comes in.

I’ve been doing research on Whitman’s relationship to his paralysis later in life. After a paralytic stroke in 1873, Whitman was debilitated, and his conception of himself as such comes through in his 1882 prose memoirs, Specimen Days (available on Project Gutenberg if you’re interested). Much of the memoir recalls his visits to the farm of his friends, George and Susan Stafford, in southern New Jersey, where he spent a lot of time idling about in nature. One passage, titled “Summer Sights and Indolencies,” reads:

June 10th.—As I write, 5-1/2 P.M., here by the creek, nothing can exceed the quiet splendor and freshness around me. We had a heavy shower, with brief thunder and lightning, in the middle of the day; and since, overhead, one of those not uncommon yet indescribable skies (in quality, not details or forms) of limpid blue, with rolling silver-fringed clouds, and a pure-dazzling sun. For underlay, trees in fulness of tender foliage—liquid, reedy, long-drawn notes of birds—based by the fretful mewing of a querulous cat-bird, and the pleasant chippering-shriek of two kingfishers. I have been watching the latter the last half hour, on their regular evening frolic over and in the stream; evidently a spree of the liveliest kind. They pursue each other, whirling and wheeling around, with many a jocund downward dip, splashing the spray in jets of diamonds—and then off they swoop, with slanting wings and graceful flight, sometimes so near me I can plainly see their dark-gray feather-bodies and milk-white necks.

Here Whitman truly embraces indolence, in the sense of not just being “free from pain” but of being free, entirely, to observe the world around him, to delight in each and every thing. Take an earlier, more famous example from “Song of Myself”: “I loafe and invite my soul, / I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.” Here, as in Specimen Days, a certain languor seems to renew his soul. Perhaps this is the kind of indolence Whitman craved — and needed — in an America that was fraught with political turmoil. Indolence might be something we, too, crave. But in a world that requires change, does our poetry require politics, and can indolence fit into a political poetics? I’m gonna go be indolent now, but I’ll have more thoughts for you on Tuesday.

 

In addition to interning here at Indolent, where he edits the blog, Reuben Gelley Newmanis an undergraduate at Swarthmore College. His work appears in Alexandria Quarterly, What Rough Beast, and HIV Here & Now, and is forthcoming in The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, 2nd Edition.

A Fine Line: Bridging the Political and Poetic

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A Blog Post                                                                                                                                                                    by Jada Gordon

When I was approached by Indolent Books to help curate and edit poems for What Rough Beast, I was given clear guidelines for how to select them. The poems were to be “politically adjacent.” That is, while the poems may, and often do, reveal a clear political stance or perspective, we do not want political rants or diatribes or artless attacks on Donald Trump, his orange hair, his small hands, or similar pettiness. In short, we do not want doggerel. Rather, we want poems that portray what it is like to live in the current political climate. In the process of choosing poems to be published, I was stuck between two rocks and a hard place: I had to ensure we were caught up with the daily posting and that the poetry was “politically adjacent.” As I was looking through the poems in Submittable, I asked myself one essential question: “How can I identify if a piece is politically adjacent?”

After posing that question, I thought of the current state of affairs we’re in as a country. We’re all stuck in a similar way. Politically, personally, and artistically, we have internal and external conflicts constantly pulling us in different ways. Politically, we live in a country that seems to be at odds. One half of the country believes in the President and the administration; the other half has absolutely no faith in the President and the administration—but then we have people caught in the middle.  It’s a constant game of tug of war between two sides and we’re caught observing as artists—and in a twist of events, even choosing sides. As editors of a poetry series with a progressive orientation, how can curators deal with a submission that is “politically adjacent” and also happens to be politically conservative? That is a question that could apply to any publication, conservative or liberal/progressive. The lines of subjectivity, opinion, fact, truth and fiction are becoming more and more blurred. How do we as artists skate along the lines of poetry and politics? How do we express our perspectives without undermining our poetics? How do we merge art with politics?

This topic has been discussed many times, but I felt the need not only as a writer but as a reader to ask this question again. Artists have had a long history of being political through different artistic mediums. There are visual pieces such as Norman Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With in 1964, which depicted Ruby Bridges, the first black child to be sent to an integrated school, being escorted to school by the National Guard. Another painting, Dmitri Vrubels’ The Kiss (1990), shows Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and East German President Erich Honecker enthusiastically kissing each other. Lastly, poet Sharon Olds’s open letter to Laura Bush in 2005 explained why she wouldn’t attend the White House dinner in protest of the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq War.

This long history of artistic resistance makes it no surprise that politics and poetry, like fear and faith, are inherently intertwined these days. With the Trump administration in full swing, there have been many artistic responses to Trump and the administration. However, as an editor seeking “politically adjacent” work for publication, I have to look for poetry that portrays life as we live it in the current political climate, but that does not descend into rant or diatribe. As writers observing this administration, people want to make their voices heard in opposition to those who silence them and a government that encourages that silencing. On the other hand, we seek work that utilizes all the resources of poetry. The feelings, thoughts, and emotions can and indeed should be present, but not at the expense of craft. It may be a fine line at times, but it’s all about a balance of creativity and message that successfully merges art and politics. 

Politics is all about balance and messaging: the balance of the personal and professional life, the balance of catering to divided parties, the balance of different types of people that look to the politician to help them. Poetry is also about balance and messaging: the balance of poetic craft to tell a personal story. The balance of expressing thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and opinions in a way the draws the reader in rather than pushing the reader out. Politics and poetry have had their fair share of controversy that has made both mediums historically unique. Political moments like the Watergate scandal of 1974 and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (which faced and won an obscenity trial in 1957 upon publication) are landmark examples of that controversy.

Poetry is subjective. What, in the end, qualifies as poem as “politically adjacent”? What makes the merging of poetry and politics so enticing is that the reader experiences the poem as a conversation to which they have been invited rather than a lecture to which they have been subjected? There is no one way for the poet to balance their own creative objectives with the needs of the reader, just as there is no one way for the statesman to balance their own political agenda with the needs of the citizens whom they are elected serve. In both cases, it is a matter of craft. 

Jada Gordon is a writer, editor, and poet from the Bronx, NY. She’s won the 2017 James Tolan Student Writer Award and published and edited the magazine for BMCC’s Writing Club, The Writers’ Guild. She’s also been published on WordPress and in Sula Magazine.