At the beginning of the year, just in time for the inauguration of President Donald J. Trump, Boston Review published a poetry chapbook called Poems for Political Disaster. Collecting works by 36 poets, nearly all of which are published there for the first time, the book is a chance, according to the foreword by former U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, for “American vision makers . . . to make way through the infamous ‘Wall’ that has been propped up as one of the key symbols of and for the new you—America.”
In other words, a chance to complain about American politics, and especially Donald Trump.
The chapbook tells us quite a bit about what the left believes, but not much we don’t already know. The collection is much more interesting for what it says about what separates good from bad political poetry.
First, many poems here confirm that political poetry can be the silliest and most pretentious of all. The most partisan of political poetry borders on self-parody. Here are the final lines of Carmen Gimenez-Smith’s “Excuses,” a poem about the mental strain caused by our politics:
A new
character, new species of figure.
Rough beast in a cheap suit
scales the spire. The thin crust
of money gets thinner and wrapped
in barbed wire. Ivanka, my queen.
The surprising “spire/wire” rhyme is an oasis of delight in a desert of silliness.
Maureen N. McLane manages to make it through all of “#WTF” before remembering to give the people what they want: “whoops did I forget / to say fuck / Donald Trump?” As bad as that joke seems, it’s a relief after absurd stream-of-consciousness passages like this:
[Obama] used to run Harvard Law Review
I went to school with John Yoo
But didn’t know him nor you
No excuses, not knowing
No Excuses jeans, Marla Maples
Donna Rice Paula Jones
What came between them
and their Calvins Brooke Shields
—she’s looking handsome
these days…
This game of pop-cultural, jean brand free association is probably less fun to read than it was to write.
Mary Jo Bang’s prose poem “In November We Inched Closer” (to fascism, that is) imagines a ride on a train—the Trump Train—that “pass[es] through Germany first.” It ends with these bitter words about the new president and the people who voted for him: “The last I saw of the sky, the moon was a man with moronic orange hair, dressed in a frock coat and collar, swearing to serve no one but himself to the duped on his way to a tower.”
You get the idea.
To their credit, the editors did not include only anti-Trump poems. There are several about racial violence and racial tensions, including Jericho Brown’s powerful “Riddle.” Indeed, the most effective poems don’t mock or even mention Trump. Stephen Burt’s “Concord Grapes” uses the title fruit first as a symbol for “belong[ing] / entirely in your own body, or in your own country or at / your own address” and then, gradually, revolution. There are references to the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, the history and nature of the grape itself. After describing the traditional image of dawn as a metaphor for revolution, he concludes:
The motion sensor-operated
lights that hang, and sometimes swing,
like tennis rackets, from the corners
of our eaves over the fence are always darkest
just before they get turned on.
It’s an odd but effective image that both hints at hope and reminds us of the distance between us and the times the poem describes.
Ange Mlinko’s “Days of 2016” stands out because she does interesting things with stanza structures and rhyme schemes. Its political references are also relatively subtle: a narrative of a plane flight the day after the election, it includes references to the Zika virus, “an absentee ballot,” and “a little turbulence” in the air over D.C., “as if to shake us free.” The poem’s political perspective is clear, but because Mlinko is in no rush to vent, she gives herself space to demonstrate impressive craftsmanship and care.
By contrast, “America (after Allen Ginsberg)” by Craig Santos Perez is as loose as its inspiration would suggest, and it includes a number of screedy lines, such us: “America why are your libraries full of the homeless? / America when will you feed your hungry children? / I’m sick of your obscene inequality.” But it adds a layer of complexity by satirizing the speaker’s commitment:
My mind is made up there’s going to be an online petition.
America you should’ve seen me reading Fanon.
My yoga teacher thinks my chakras are almost perfectly aligned.
America I won’t stand for the Star-Spangled Banner.
Perez’s poem, like the best ones in this chapbook, brings to mind what Keats once wrote a friend: “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems to put its hand into its breeches pocket.” Keats was referring to the poetic styles of Wordsworth and Byron, but it’s also useful to keep in mind for poetry that doubles as partisan rhetoric.
You don’t need to have read Orwell to recognize that partisan writing tends to be insincere and robotic, two traits that art must avoid. Partisan writing demands a loud immediacy, whereas art is more often the “foster-child of silence and slow time.” To cite a more recent passage, what Parul Sehgal says of novelists applies also to poets:
The most effective political poems approach their targets indirectly. Consider the two poems that enjoyed remarkable popularity last year, particularly during and after the presidential campaign. Wendy Cope’s “Differences of Opinion” became an anti-Trump anthem, and Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” was shared widely and even featured on a primetime network drama, because as the Washington Post put it, it captured “the mood . . . of so many people in the tumultuous year that was 2016.” Neither of these poems is specifically about Trump or even about politics, but both gave readers the imaginative breathing room to apply them to contemporary political concerns.
A handful of poems in Poems for Political Disaster take a similarly oblique approach. It’s a more difficult technique, to be sure, but one that’s more likely to appeal to readers through beauty and craft, art and openness. And if poets are interested in using their words to repair political disasters, it’s the method they should use.
