Poetry and Politics

It’s a tricky business. The language of political persuasion often consists of dead words exhausted and limp from rhetorical flourishes. Be careful what you say; you don’t know whose mouth those sentences came out of.

Yet poets do not breathe rarefied oxygen. They inhale the common air and live in the commonweal. As citizens with heightened awareness they cannot stand by as silent witnesses. Particularly now when the menace of MAGA is less about regressive election issues than it is about values, deceit, indecency, the march to moral vacuity and deviant behavior; indeed, about survival itself.

Poets to the rescue. Truth is on life-support. Get us to triage and then to the maternity ward. Not to give birth to new words but to offer existing ones a smack and breathe new life in the body politic.

Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet died twelve days after the CIA coup overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973. Neruda was deemed so dangerous to the despotic regime of Pinochet that there is a strong suspicion he was poisoned. His poetry was meant to tutor a biting silence.

His poems on the power of love can be read as a political act in opposition to the cruelty and violence of the military regime. In the hands of a beloved poet words become swords.

But vehemence does not a poem make. The indignation must be delivered obliquely; perhaps as objective correlative, to elicit either the palm or the fist. Does the cut worm forgive the plow?

During the McCarthy days Elia Kazan, Arthur Miller and Carl Foreman expressed their opposing views through their art. All were allegories either in defense of an informant as in On the Waterfront or the condemnation of passivity in a conformist culture in The Crucible and High Noon.

The poetry of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen will endure far longer than the colossal stupidity of why WWI was fought.

Red lips are not so red / as the stained stones kissed by the English dead.        Wilfred Owen

If they should ask you why I died / tell them because our fathers lied.          Rudyard Kipling

          

If there is a husk, as Robert Bly suggested, which separates the external from internal concerns, it becomes the task of the poet to find an opening. Ironically the most powerful political poems issue from the depth of one’s psyche. This flow between the public and private is particularly striking right now as we shudder to imagine the possible damage to be inflicted by a pathological miscreant with a 6^th grade vocabulary. His damaged inner life is being projected onto the big screen of the entire society.

We have come now to see how fragile is the web. Our national fabric trembles. The threads are frayed in our coat of many colors. Can words serve to reweave and restore the apparel that doth proclaim us?