Political Poems

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my
Back and face your distant destiny,

Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves

But how do we fashion the future? Who can say how
except in the minds of those who will call it Now?

I’m the cranky President sneaking away
to swim in the Potomac.

and I am waiting
for the lost music to sound again
in the Lost Continent
in a new rebirth of wonder

Listen to the music of centuries,
Rising above the mushroom time.

Let your laughter come free
remembering looking toward peace:
“We must disenthrall ourselves.”

The umbrella’d congressmen; the rapping tires
of big black cars, the shoulders of lobbyists
caught under canopies and in doorways,

We cannot name their names, or number their dates
—circle on circle, like rings on a tree—

Looking at Jefferson now,
I think of the language
he left for us to live by.

Who are they as bats and night
dogs askant in the capitol?

Freedom I said: the enduring ally cells.
Interested in the view, in our aid sensitivities.

this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,
We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

The land was there before us
Was the land. Then things
Began happening fast.

The poets are going home
To the blood-haunted villages,

We can-
not extricate
a place from those


it’s made of,

I think that if my tongue alone could talk
it would swear
in any court that poetry
tastes like the iodine in blood,

You said to me that day,
“There’s nothing you can do,”
and spoke of Auden’s line:
“Poetry makes nothing happen.”

Is peace merely a vacuum, the negative
Of creation, or the absence of war?
The teaching says Peace is a positive energy.
Still something in me resists that sweet milk,

No bars are set too close, no mesh too fine
To keep me from the eagle and the lion,

We holler these trysts to be self-exiled that all manatees are credited
equi-distant ...

I suspect that one could posit that poets who shatter how we engage the world through the rupture of language, for instance, are engaged in a political act.

Two very different new books, one by Naomi Shihab Nye and one by Kent Johnson, turn epistolary toward remarkably similar and fierce political ends.

what is a political poem today and how do we describe, experience, understand the intimate balance going on between information, sentiment and aesthetics that determines how we read a poem and whether it even seems political to us

It’s true that I do not usually sit down to write about something, but more and more I want poems to be about something—something important and meaningful—and I want poetry not just to be something or be about something but to do something.

For myself, I am always asking: how can poetry effectively address political issues (particularly related to the decolonization of my home island of Guåhan)? At the same time, I ask: how can poetry and poets engage with the public and political sphere beyond the page/book?

Rare is the poet who doesn't view himself as deeply invested in political life, and yet the sloppy, compromised, and frequently idiotic business of democracy—which is, for all its flaws, the way most political changes occur in this country—rarely attracts the attention of our best poets. Is this the inevitable order of things?

I have been working on a book that tries to pull together some kind of answer to the question Orr poses. If I'm lucky, all my rooting around in dingy archives in pursuit of an answer will also produce a thesis or two on a related question, one raised not long ago in a post by Lucia Perillo on the Poetry Foundation's "Harriet" blog: why are contemporary poets generally aligned with the political left?

America’s poets have a minimal presence in American civic discourse and a minuscule public role in the life of American democracy. I find this condition perplexing and troubling—both for poetry and for democracy.

Is Biespiel advocating for more politics in poems? Fewer arguments about poetics for the good of the nation? Arguments about poetics are good for poetry. And have nothing whatsoever to do with public life, whether your poetics are politically-grounded or not.

There are bosses in poetry as well as in the industrial empire and everything else, and what I want to talk to you about today is simply that—how to manage yourself in your own individual way, I guess, since no poet who’s worthy of the term doesn’t.

Robert Lowell's “July in Washington” puts America in a vegetable context.

Secret terrorist communications or just plain poetry?

Charles Bernstein, Patricia Smith and Forrest Gander offer presidential advice.

Elizabeth Alexander on how the Derek Walcott-toting, June Jordan-quoting president will affect poets and poetry.

Hear who Elizabeth Alexander would have picked and her thoughts on Frost and other past inaugural poets.

How Seamus Heaney defines Ireland's 1972 troubles with a portrait of a drunken seaman blown up in a pub.