Since when does modern poetry make the front page? When it can be used to attack President Trump. The front of Saturday’s New York Times featured the breaking news that poets don’t like him. It's a convenient excuse to mainline left-wing anger straight onto the front of the paper, and proving it will leave no angle behind in its quest to denormalize the president. Alexandra Alter's story: “American Poets, Refusing to Go Gentle, Rage Against the Right.”
The poet Jane Hirshfield has never thought of herself as an agitator. A self-described “genuine introvert,” Ms. Hirshfield likes to spend her days gardening, hiking and writing verses about nature, impermanence and interconnectedness.
But a couple of months ago, to her own surprise, she emailed the organizers of the March for Science in Washington and urged them to make poetry part of the protest. At the rally on Saturday, Ms Hirshfield will read her new poem “On the Fifth Day,” which addresses climate change denial and the Trump administration’s dismantling of environmental regulations.
“I’ve never done anything like that before,” Ms. Hirshfield said. “I don’t even give dinner parties.”
The march will also feature pop-up poetry writing workshops, and more than 20 banners with science poems by Gary Snyder, W .S. Merwin, Tracy K. Smith and others. (Ms. Hirshfield also wanted to have a donkey carrying baskets with printed-out poems, but the organizers rejected that idea).
“Poems are visible right now, which is terribly ironic, because you rather wish it weren’t so necessary,” she said. “When poetry is a backwater it means times are O.K. When times are dire, that’s exactly when poetry is needed.”
Like virtually everything else in the Trump era, poetry has gotten sharply political these days. Writers are responding to this turbulent moment in the country’s history with a tsunami of poems that address issues like immigration, global warming, the Syrian refugee crisis, institutionalized racism, equal rights for transgender people, Islamophobia and health care.
And the Times is riding that same bandwagon, giving free front-page publicity to left-wing activism.
The recent resurgence of protest poems reflects a new strain of contemporary American poetry, one that is deeply engaged with public policy and the latest executive orders coming from the White House. At a moment when many artists and writers have joined a diffuse resistance movement on the left, a vocal and mobilized group of poets are using their work to wrestle with some of the most pressing issues in American culture and politics.
....
More recently, a new, politically engaged generation of young African-American, Latino and Asian poets have written verses that address institutionalized bias and the Black Lives Matter movement. Critically acclaimed poets like Claudia Rankine, whose 2014 collection “Citizen” became a best seller with more than 200,000 copies in print, have demonstrated that there’s an enormous appetite for poetry that deals bluntly with racism, civic identity and social justice.
Alter promised more ugly, aggressive, didactic work to come.
But poets, scholars and publishers say the flood of protest poems after the 2016 election stands apart from earlier eras in both its quantity and intensity and its stylistic and thematic diversity. Some see the emerging body of brash political poetry as a stark departure from the more introspective, personal style that characterized so much of 20th-century American poetry.
If you’re not a big fan of today’s politicized poetry jams, here's a sample of what you’re missing.
Poets are using social media to respond quickly to the news, posting new verses online. Hours after the election results came in on Nov. 8, Danez Smith, a 27-year-old poet in Minneapolis, wrote a poem about losing faith in the country, titled “You’re Dead, America.” It was published on BuzzFeed on Nov. 9, and includes the verses, “on the TV/ is the man from TV/ is gonna be president/ he has no word/ & hair beyond simile/ you’re dead, America.” Smith, who identifies with neither gender and prefers no courtesy title, has also written poems about health care and police violence, which have been used on signs and read aloud at Black Lives Matter protests.
....
There seems to be a growing audience for poetry that speaks to the anxieties of our era. In November, a few days after the election, the Academy of American Poets and the online publication Brain Pickings organized an “emergency” pop-up poetry reading in Washington Square Park in New York, where hundreds of people gathered to hear 20 poets, among them Patricia Smith and Elizabeth Alexander.
Traffic to the academy’s online poetry archive has surged in recent months. Maya Angelou’s poem, “Still I Rise,” has been viewed nearly 470,000 times since Nov. 8, compared to about 280,000 times in that period the previous year, while Langston Hughes’s poem, “Let America Be America Again,” has been viewed some 280,000 times, up from about 88,000 times. Last year, some 20 million people read poems on the academy’s website.
Alter made a brief acknowledgement of the ideological thrust of this new poetry movement.
[Poet Amit] Majmudar said he tried to include a range of perspectives. “I was equally open to an anti-globalization poem as I was to a Trumpocalypse Now poem,” he said in an email. But poets tend to be liberal, and the submissions skewed heavily to the left.
The selected works include blunt poems that refer directly to Mr. Trump, in decidedly unflattering terms. Erica Dawson’s poem “They Call Them Blue My Mind” quotes Mr. Trump’s boasts about grabbing women’s genitals. In a seething poem titled “Now,” Frederick Seidel takes aim at the administration, writing, “N ow a dictatorship of vicious spineless slimes/ We the people voted in has taken over.”
Others in the collection are less partisan, and deal with anti-Semitism, immigration, the refugee crisis and mass shootings.
Perhaps not “partisan,” but even those sound as avowedly left-wing and thuddingly didactic as the more bluntly anti-Trump screeds.
