Expanding the Political

I Woke Up

and it was political
I made coffee and the coffee was political
I took a shower and the water was.

                                      -Jameson Fitzpatrick, “I Woke Up”

The first time I read Jameson Fitzpatrick’s “I Woke Up,” I remember feeling so excited. It was as if there was a huge balloon expanding in my chest, ready to burst. This poem seems to me to go back to the old, ancient roots of the lyric as epideictic discourse, discourse that aims, as Jonathan Culler puts it in Theory of the Lyric, to “praise or persuade.”  The poem concludes:

I thought I was not a political poet and still
my imagination was political.
It had been, this whole time I was asleep.

After reading this poem, I felt as if a whole new way of thinking and being had opened up to me, which was powerful and exciting and frightening. I felt as if I’d been woken up, as if my thinking had been shifted into a new, more radical space.

This isn’t the first time poetry has done this for me. It happened before, when I was given a copy of The World’s Wife by Carol Ann Duffy, when I was 18. In the Book of Acts, the Apostle Paul, who is blind, converts to Christianity:

And immediately there fell from his eyes as it had been scales: and he
     received sight forthwith,
and arose, and was baptized

Duffy’s rewriting of fairy tales and myth made me feel as if I’d been walking around with scales on my eyes. I could see, but it was as if the world had been grey and indistinct before and suddenly everything was in color. In Duffy’s rendering, the women of those myths and fairy tales resist, fight back, and speak out. Little Red Riding Hood comes to a sexual awakening with the wolf, with whom she forges a relationship built on a shared love of language, before killing him herself and finding “the glistening, virgin white of her grandmother’s bones.” Queen Herod orders the murder of all male babies to protect her daughter from a broken heart, and Penelope ends up not missing Odysseus at all.

 I’m not sure where I would be without that book, and now I feel the same about Fitzpatrick’s poem, whose closing lines make me think of Adrienne Rich’s essay “When We Dead Awaken.” I remember reading Rich’s essay and thinking I have been one of the dead. I have been sleepwalking through my life. Rich advocates for “[r]e-vision,” which she defines as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction.” This is what Duffy does throughout The World’s Wife, with great skill and deadpan humor. And this is what Fitzpatrick is doing—she is asking us to enter our old lives, let the scales fall from our eyes, and allow ourselves to be transformed.

 Like many writers, I’ve been in workshops, where someone airily announces they “don’t like political poetry.” When this happened several months ago, in a workshop I was facilitating, I asked the participant to clarify what they meant. They explained that they didn’t like “shouty poetry.” Someone else chimed in, saying they didn’t like “poetry that has a design on the reader, that’s trying to tell me what to think.” I think I know what they mean, although I would argue both of those things to me seem like characteristics of bad poetry, rather than political poetry.

Edward Hirsch is a poet I hugely admire, and his definition of political poetry, found in A Poet's Glossary, is useful to consider here. He says that “political poetry can only come from the poet’s need to identify her relationship to atrocities and injustice, the sources of her pain, fear and anger, the meaning of her resistance.” By way of example, Hirsch cites poems about war, poems written during or in the aftermath of incarceration, and poems dealing with nationalism or patriotism, and almost all of them by poets who are white and male. According to Hirsch, “[t]here is an ephemeral quality to a lot of political poetry—most of it dies with the events it responds to—[…].” This seems to me to be a narrow understanding of politics itself, that politics is always an “event,” rather than politics being something that permeates our everyday in myriad and infinitesimal ways. To quote Fitzpatrick’s poem again, “I made coffee and the coffee was political.” If our understanding of politics is narrowed, then our understanding of what political poetry is or can be is also diminished. 

My own understanding of political poetry is perhaps closer to Carolyn Forché’s work on “poetry of witness.” In her ground-breaking anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, Forché advocates for the need to include the social sphere alongside the personal and the political to write true “poetry of witness,” and calls for a re-balancing of these ideas. Her anthology also deals mostly with poems written in extreme circumstances such as war or incarceration—but I think this idea of encompassing the personal, social, and political, allows for an understanding of political poetry that is broad enough and flexible enough to include poetry that concerns itself with other themes. These could be the everyday concerns of the working class, or the lived experiences of women, but I also include here poetry that takes any one thing as its primary concern and refuses to look away. One of the most radical collections I’ve read in recent times was Oak by Katharine Towers—a book-long meditation on the life cycle of an oak tree. In a world where we are constantly encouraged to be distracted, to scroll on, to not notice, there is something radical in the steady, unflinching gaze of Towers in this collection.

Luce Irigaray writes, in To Be Two, that to write about the other without objectifying them, we must write about the space “between-us.” I think striving to write the “between-us” is a political act, whether the “between-us” is between oneself and another person, or oneself and an oak tree. Returning to Hirsch again, maybe the “between-us” allows us to not simply react to an event, but to explore the space between self and event, a space that is necessarily political, social, and personal. The “between-us” can be expanded to include the space between oneself and one’s own fear, oneself and one’s own anger, oneself and one’s own resistance—to create political poetry that is revolutionary rather than reactionary. 

Maybe if writers can move away from the pressure to “respond” to anything in poetry, and instead “examine,” “explore," “cast in a different light,” “uncover,” “unearth,” “circle around” ideas, experiences, and conditions of our world, the poems that result from such careful acts of attention will not possess the ephemeral quality that Hirsch speaks of.

Vicki Feaver’s “1974” is one of the most political poems I know, although it makes no mention of war or patriotism or incarceration, and I don’t know if Feaver thinks of it as a political poem. In the space of 22 lines, Feaver considers the complicated legacies of literary foremothers like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Emily Dickinson, before concluding with an almost violent awakening:

I’m a poet!’ I lied
jolting myself to life:
a woman buried under ice
with words burning inside

***

I decide to go for a run in the dark. We’re in the middle of a heatwave in the UK, so early morning or late at night are the only choices for running at the moment. On a busy, well-lit street, a car full of men drives past and the men shout as they get level with me, loud enough to make me jump. They don’t slow down, and I can’t hear what they say. It’s a wordless shout, something animal, and I realize that it’s not even driven by lust but by a mindless desire to make me afraid, to see me jump in fright. 

That same night, as if I’m being trolled by the patriarchy itself, I’m awoken by my neighbor at around 3am. He’s trying to kick his own door in because he thinks his wife has locked him out on purpose. I hear her quiet reply that the back door is open, that she hasn’t locked it, and his angry shout: “You’ve fucking locked me out, open this fucking door.” I had thought the neighbor was a nice guy—maybe he still is? Both he and his wife had come to our garden only a few nights before to sit in the late sunshine and introduce their new baby boy to our three-year-old.

If I write a poem about that run or about my neighbor, it will be about, as Hirsch puts it, the sources of my pain, my fear, my anger, the meaning of my resistance. It will be about what it’s like to live with the potential of violence every day, underneath the veneer of civility. It will be about sometimes feeling as if I need to gather up those fish scales that fell from my eyes so long ago and put them back on just so I can move through the world without wanting to scream. It will be about the dark. It will be about safety and terror and the moon and lights and blame and sadness and anger. It will be about the body marking you out, the body calling fear, calling anger, calling pain so that it runs alongside you and jumps into your bones, into your arms and your legs, into your heart. It will be about how hard it is to run away from my three-year-old and into the night, how I trick myself every time into thinking the darkness is mine to move through, that I am safe. And if it is a good poem, it will be about something else as well, something that I don’t know yet, something that I will only discover in the writing of the poem.