by Sara Aboulafia
"The crossroads of poetry and politics is a place where craft
encounters commitment, where the spirit of dissent encounters
the imagination, where we labor to create a culture of conscience."
--Martin Espada
Last fall I took a class called Poetry and the Political Imagination with poet Martin Espada. Espada is large, bearded man who cuts a rather imposing figure – on one of my first days in class, he stood at the teacher’s podium and presented himself as a man who had muddled through plenty of dirty work, from his job as a bar-room bouncer to his long-time career as a lawyer, before he landed what he considered to be a rather cushy teaching job. He was unapologetic, someone who took his subject seriously, and at first he left me more than a little intimidated. Over the course of the first few days of the class, I learned that he was acquainted with virtually everyone on his reading list – from writer Carolyn Forche to Allen Ginsberg, whom he referred to simply as Allen, "because I knew him."
One of his lesser-known writer-friends on his reading list, Vietnam war veteran’s Doug Anderson’s poetry left me shuddering and on the verge of tears. I can still remember vividly his description of the small Vietnamese girl bathing in water as Anderson’s troop moved across a bridge in his Bamboo Bridge, and the troop’s reaction to the girl’s look of disgust as their white men’s gaze fell upon her:
We cross the bridge, quietly.
The bathing girl does not see us
till we've stopped and gaped like fools
There are no catcalls, whoops
none of the things that soldiers do...
For a moment we all hold the same thought,
that there is life in life and war is shit....
And then she turns and sees us there
sinks in the water
eyes full of hate
the trance broken
We move into the village on the other side.
I wondered at how these small, simply-worded poems moved through me – images of war and the disturbed boyhood of soldiers who, between gunfire and stepping hesitatingly around mortal landmines, had little time to take stock of their own experiences. Espada expressed a belief that poetry is capable of serving to memorialize and bear witness to human history, and in Anderson’s poetry I found a brave and unflinching eye for its absolute horrors.
Espada’s were lectures so beautifully and succinctly written and delivered that I scribbled each word religiously, but it was what he said outside of class one day to me and my classmate Ben that I will never forget; "The life of the poet," he said, leaning in closely, "is the life of the road. The life of the poet is a lonely one." Though I searched for a hint of irony from the much-appreciated poet, I could find none at all (it wasn’t until some time later that Espada began to show his funny side: subtle, dry, and built upon trust).
Martin Espada offered me a window into both what political poetry was, and what it meant to lead the life of a political poet – the curious mix of engaged and withdrawn, incisive and reflective. Two nights ago, at Lighthouse’s DNC salon on writing and politics held in the hip backroom lounge of hip LoHi restaurant Forest Room 5, I was reintroduced to all of the questions I asked of political poetry and what it meant to be a "political poet" in that class. Though the DNC salon didn’t speak specifically to the topic of how to write about timely campaign politics, the panelists had a compelling discussion considering the eternally hazardous task of writing the political.
The four panelists - novelists Nick Arvin and Janis Hallowell and poets Jake Adam York and David J. Rothman - presented differing viewpoints on writing and politics that Espada’s class seemed to embrace without exclusion. Can we, for example, consider transcendental, revelatory, Whitman-esque poetry political? Does one have to engage in partisan politics to be a political poet? Does one have to invoke the horrors of war to be a political poet? Finally, should poetry (and perhaps all writing) be, as reflected in the title of the Curbstone Press anthology Espada edited, "like bread, for everyone?" Does this mean our political literature has be widely accessible to "the people," populist, perhaps teetering into the facile? Or can it remain challenging, provoking, questioning?
At the salon, such questions were responded to graciously but unapologetically, and I’ll admit right now that there’s no way that I can do justice to all four of the writers’ many differing positions (not including the audience’s own challenges). Their viewpoints seemed to collide as strongly as but were spoken more deftly than TV political pundits, and I found all of their perspectives worthy, lively, and challenging.
At the salon, poet David Rothman advocated vehemently for the poet as activist in lived-experience, even if the poetry itself doesn’t necessarily read as political. Nick Arvin, the author of the recently-published World War II book Articles of War, admitted that he was a bit uncomfortable around the idea that "everything is political," assuming that the term would have to be broadened so much as to lose all meaning. Rothman also expressed discomfort with this idea, arguing that the social can be separated from the political (except in the case of fascist states and the unfortunate attempt of Social Realism to marry the two), with Jake Adam York arguing that the line could never be clear.
York argued for a poetry which enables the reader to challenge her own prejudices toward the poetic subject. Such an epistemological challenge, York argued, one which challenges a particular way of thinking, can stand the test of time more so than poetry which speaks to a specific political occasion – Langston Hughes’ Weary Blues, about the loneliness of a black piano player, stands the test of time more so than the Scotsborough Boys for this reason. It is those black poets who challenge white readers to reflect on their own reaction to black work and language who do this most effectively, York suggested (apologies to York for this meager summary). Janis Hallowell, a fiction writer, responded to York’s thoughts with a self-deprecating laugh – "I had a shitty education. I didn’t learn about ‘epistemology,’ she joked to audience laughter (and some sympathetic clapping). Her recently-published book She Was follows the protagonist Doreen Woods into her past as a Vietnam war-protester.
For Hallowell, it was her characters who "politicized" her. Her book, whose protagonist engages political issues and social movements in the latter-half of the twentieth-century, from Vietnam and the civil rights era to the war in Iraq, took her "towards the politics." And yet, Hallowell remarked, "If I thought I was writing a political novel, I would have stopped." For Hallowell, the political implications of her work had to be unconscious for her to write. And though his book’s subject is war and a soldier’s life, Nick Arvin didn’t want to be interpreted politically: "This is not a political character," he said.
Whatever their stance toward or their definition of the "political," the differences between the poets and prose writers seemed to be less about the extent of their education, perhaps, and more about the possibilities that different literary forms provide for writers. York’s urging toward a political poetry which engaged enduring themes (the nature of racism and prejudice, for example) rather than topical situations perhaps grew out of his belief that poetry is often sequestered from day-to-day events. And Hallowell’s politicization through her characters seems to be an approach which is embedded in the world of fiction (though this approach is certainly not limited to prose).
Both attempts to engage the political rely on the kind of challenge to the reader that York argued was central to political awareness. For me, the spoken-word poem "Blink Your Eyes," by Sekou Sundiata is one of these poems, one I can’t get out of my head and that remains tied to the tip of my tongue. "Blink" gives us a picture of an innocent man being pulled over in his car: "It’s all about the skin, it’s all about the skin, it’s all about the skin you’re living in," Sundiata says, coming back repeatedly to the poetic chorus, speaking – no, crooning - with the kind of hope and faith that that needs to be repeated to be believed: "I could wake up in the morning without a warning and the world could/Change..."
"Disturb is change," Jake Adam York said, a Southern poet deeply enmeshed himself in the racial politics of the South. Through a piece of literature one can inhabit other lives– the heart of an innocent black man pulled over in his car, and possibilities – the possibility that one day it could be different. Such work is powerful because, as York put it at the salon, it "offends you just enough so that you understand you don’t have access [to this world] but [also] entices you into it." And, as a white person, though it may be discomfiting to me to read a poem alien to my experience, it is also challenging in a way that makes "possible a kind of empathetic imagination."
When you come right down to it, perhaps more than any other previous election, the 2008 presidential campaign (though perhaps the stuff of TV news and YouTube, as the panelists pointed out) has been as much about the issues as it has been about the candidates’ ability to win people’s empathy. Though our ability to relate to candidates is often steeped in the murky manipulation of campaign strategists and their ever-changing rhetoric (Does McCain really care about women’s issues, and have any respect for Hilary Clinton? Does Obama care deeply about the working class, after all?), no one can deny that the quarrel between the candidates is largely a matter, as Lighthouse executive director Michael Henry pointed out at the end of the salon, of which story is being told and who is telling that story.
The ability to read the competing election coverage stories with an eye toward the past (What does it mean to be Establishment or Old Guard? And how many successful presidents have come in with little experience?) and an ear for narrative rhetoric is a priceless talent. It’s not just the writers that are capable of "bearing witness" to the lessons of history, then, but ourselves as readers.
That may be why, at the end of the salon, one audience member asked the room to name out loud their own favorite political poets, just to hear them on our tongues so that she knew they were on our minds, and so we could turn to each others’ favorites. (When I got home I continued to think of them – Yusef Kumonyaaka, whom I read one night in bed and fell asleep, dreaming a poem in his cadence and rhythm. And Patricia Smith, the startingly gifted and daring spoken word poet whose poem about her writer-son composing letters for his fellow inmates rips me to tears, and there are so many, many more). Picking up a book of poetry and prose – whether explicitly political or not - can, in the end, teach us all to read between the lines.
