no sleep

The poet will not let you sleep.

mad meantime

In a perfect world no political poetry would be written. In the mad meantime, we must ‘write’ the wrongs.

doesn't stand up

A poetry of lame polemics.

not words alone

Poetry
Forgive me for helping you understand
that you're not made of words alone.

—Rogue Dalton, "Poetic Art" (1974)

fire-breather

A political poet whose mouth was like a flamethrower: He had the sympathetic audience leaning back in their seats to avoid being singed.

apology for political poetry

Someone will always be making apologies for political poetry.

pressed poetry

Oppression makes poets. In the land of perfect liberty songs are not pressed out of the heart.

—Elia Peattie (8/14/96: 8)

[Emerson: Poems are expedients to get bread. (paraphrase)]

tell it

Necessarily the times had shifted poetry toward rhetoric.

speaking role

A poet who won’t be shouted down.

poetics of the political

It’s the poetics in a political poem that make it matter.

pointed texts

Documentary poetics: Utilizing found poetry for its political aspect.

dialed up the volume

A poet who wrote for the bullhorn.

possibly political

Does politics inform your art? I’m not interested in agitprop. However, I think ambiguity can be read in a number of ways. I decided to show Descension—a whirlpool I created nearly five years ago—in Brooklyn Bridge Park in 2017 to draw attention to a certain state of America. I did not declare it. Otherwise the work is enslaved to a political context and has no bigger life.

Why is that? The best work has numerous layers of meaning. We see it in great poetry, like W.H. Auden’s 1947 poem The Age of Anxiety, where the war was never described. The Age of Anxiety could be this age, it could be all ages—the poem lives on by not being banal.

—Anish Kapoor, “5 Questions,” Time, February 12, 2018, interview by Tara John.

the good fight

The announcement flyer for “Poetry of Resistance” pictured an older poet, sitting in a comfortable chair, bookcases behind him, his dog at his knee: “To the barricades!”

take it to the streets

The street poet was threatened by the local authorities with vagrancy and public nuisance. It was then he knew he’d made it as a poet.

more is required

A poet who believed he was an activist because he’d ranted a few poems at readings.

on their radar

A poem becomes a political poem when the established powers recognize it as a threat.

[Case in point: Mahmoud Darwish.]

battle lines

There are many ways to go wrong in writing a political poem, but the number is no greater than those encountered in writing a love poem.

world love

A political poem is a love poem to the world.

part of the whole

A good political poem manages to make the specific events that provoked it part of an ongoing universal struggle.