charge to poets

It’s the poet’s responsibility to learn the truth from the powerless.

—Grace Paley, “Of Poetry and Women and the World,” Just a Thought (FSG, 1998)

apology for political poetry

Someone will always be making apologies for political poetry.

no time for games

These were not the days for language play.

reality check

The conceptual poet strays at his own risk into the real world.

[Thinking of Kenneth Goldsmith]

precise song

George Oppen wrote, in his great poem “Route,” “If having come so far we shall have / Song // Let it be small enough.” I take this less to mean that our human capacity for song is (or should be) diminished than that it should, in a time of crisis and violence, be particular. Almost anything is beautiful if particular enough—something Oppen, in his relentless quest for precision and specificity, well knew.

—G. C. Waldrep, Poems and Their Making: A Conversation (Etruscan Press, 2015), moderated by Philip Brady.

no shopping list

And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream, or bumpersticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter.

—June Jordan, June Jordan’s Poetry for the People (Routledge, 1995), edited by Lauren Miller.

[Quoted from Illuminations: Great Writers on Writing (T&WBooks, 2003), edited by Christina Davis & Christopher Edgar.]

that stance

Too personal, too political, too plain…I loved—and love—his [Etheridge Knight’s] work because of the overwhelming passion, the variety of form, and the exact appropriateness of the language. I almost didn’t realize the nervousness, the “calm hysteria” of the poems, their unity of voice, and their overwhelming political stance. It’s almost as if the poet—and his poems—were so grounded, so authentic, that I took that stance for granted. Thus spoke Etheridge; thus was Etheridge. I almost took for granted the magnificent art.

—Gerald Stern, “Etheridge Knight,” Stealing History (Trinity Univ. Press, 2012)

long, continuing process

In 1956, I had begun dating each of my poems by year. I did this because I was finished with the idea of a poem as a single, encapsulated event, a work of art complete in itself; and I knew my life was changing, my work was changing, and I needed to indicate to readers my sense of being engaged in a long, continuing process. It seems to me now that this was an oblique political statement—a rejection of the dominant critical idea that the poem’s text should be read as separate from the poet’s everyday life in the world. It was a declaration that placed poetry in a historical continuity, not above or outside history.

—Adrienne Rich, title essay of Blood, Bread, and Poetry (Norton, 1986)

intellectual luxury good

When poetry is cut off from its social, cultural and political underpinnings, it becomes an intellectual luxury good.