Aleathia Drehmer:  In light of the world we are living in today, with politics around every corner, we thought it might be interesting to explore the effects of politics in writing. It seems there are many writers in the underground scene (and in other scenes) that lace their work with politically charged themes like war, poverty, global warming, immigration, racism, feminism, etc.

The question we are looking to ask is "How important are these writings to the underground, and how far do these works go to change a common persons political outlook? Does political writing make a difference in the grand scheme of things?"

Have a go with this one and lets try to keep it about more about the writing and less about the party line.

Aleathia Drehmer


Michael Grover:  I guess I would have to tell you a little bit about myself if I were to explain why I have to be a political writer.
My father is a socialist union electrician. He has been all of my life. He retires next year. I have always been raised to rebel against the system. By the time I was 16 I had Ginsberg's "Howl", The Beat Reader, The Communist Manifesto, and all kinds of stuff like that.
I moved to LA I started to see injustice first hand. Just the effects of poverty on myself and other people. I had a poet friend that slept in the back of a pick-up truck in the middle of Hollywood. Of course when I found that out he was sharing the apartment with me. To me it was never a choice if I was gonna write political poetry. It just came naturaly. Like everything else I started writing bad political poetry and just got better at it. So that brings me to where I am today. As for the question "Does it make a difference?" I can tell you there is a lot of intention behind what I write. I would like to think it counts for something.

Misti Rainwater-Lites:  I write poems about my life and whatever I read about in the news that affects me. Poverty, mental illness, loss and isolation have been realities for me throughout my life. Those realities tend to inspire politically charged poems. The Andrea Yates story inspired me to write a poem. The West Memphis Three story inspired me to write several poems and put together a poetry anthology (which I gave over to my friend Mic Johnson...the anthology will be published at lulu.com soon and the title will be West Memphis Witch Hunt). Do I think political poems make a difference? Sadly, no. I haven't seen any evidence of that. "America, You Can..." is one of my most politically charged poems. Whenever I've read that poem at certain readings in Albuquerque, I could feel the electricity in the room and the heat on my face. Out of the corner of my eye I could see poets who tend to stick to safe subjects squirming in their seats. So you can get a reaction with political poems but I don't know about change. Maybe I should start sending my poems to senators instead of editors. If I thought that would do some good, I'd be all over it.

Miles J. Bell:  Had a very similar conversation with S.A. Griffin a while back, about why you see many of the poets on MySpace posting bulletins about loss of human rights and what terrible legislation they're bringing in, but in their poems it's absent. We came to the conclusion, and I think Roland Barthes said it too amongst others, that writing is in itself a political act. Change the world by changing yourself. Poltical poetry, I don't think, has much impact, certainly on those who OUGHT to be reading it, it's more a case of preaching to the converted. And the difficulty as I see it is there's a good deal of difference between politics and the political. I know if I tried to write an overtly political poem, rather than have hints in there like I actually write, I would have difficulty, maybe by trying to be too broad in scope and missing the details that make it human. I'm not saying there isn't a point and a place for political poetry, it's just I'd feel awkward trying it. It ain't me. What I DO write, sometimes, is about injustice and poverty, either mine or that which I see myself out my front door. Which is to me just as political in its own way as a poem about changing terrorism laws or asylum or death camps, where I have no definite 3D, personal things to say.

Aleathia Drehmer:  Miles, I think you bring up an interesting point about how political issues can be brought up more subtly in poetry. Sometimes I believe those have more weight with me when I read them because they take me by surprise, maybe the writer slips an idea in the middle or the end of a poem that I didn't expect. I think capturing those small instances of social injustice mark me the most, and I too have written about those nearly unseen things, but there have been writers with an outspoken political voice that have moved me as well like Emerson and Whitman. As a young girl they steered me deeper into poetry, and deeper into understanding that there was a world outside the po-dunk towns I was living in, a world that suffered under different factions of politics. They made me go in search of ideas.

In my life today though, I have a very hard time reading political works. I don't watch the news anymore and I steer as far from politics as I can. This isn't to say that the world's issues aren't of interest to me or that I don't feel for those who have atrocities committed against them, it is maybe that I feel too much and cannot stand to bear it.

Michael Grover:  Miles it's not absent in all of us.

Miles J. Bell:  I know, Mike, I said many, not all. I know your stuff, and you do it well. Credit to you.

J. Ryberg: Just out of curiosity, can anybody think of 5 (or more) famous political poems. Just wondering.

Aleathia Drehmer:   I don't think I can think of five off the top of my head but I can tell you the ones that made me stand up and take notice in my life. I remember in high school being introduced by a very excitable English teacher the works of Emerson, Whitman, and Thoreau. At 15, these might not be very exciting reads, but the teacher's enthusiasm for them made me interested. I read "Leaves of Grass" on my own and something in me changed. Here was a man not afraid of his voice and he was willing to speak out about the civil war, about what it meant to him, to a country of people whose voices might never be heard. It impressed me. Did it make me political? No. Did it make me want to write politically charged work? No. But it did show me that one voice could be heard among the millions, that it could make a difference. I had similar revelations reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays. Maybe I am just a Transcendentalist at heart. As cliche as it may be, Bob Dylan was a man of many words and his political songs get me riled up. There are too many of them to name, but they always felt gritty and street to me. There is also a storyteller named Utah Phillips whose work I really enjoy. He makes me think about the world at a different angle, makes me want to change the way I walk through my life.

Michael Grover:  Five famouse political poems? Howl by Ginsberg, A Dream Deffered by Langston Hughes, Lament For Ignacio Sanchez Mjias by Federico Garcia Lorca, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas, and Dog by Lawrence Ferlenghetti

David Blaine:  Ah, well, if I couldn't write political poems I probably couldn't write.

I'm a cynic, and I think that one of the duties of anyone sitting in the office of poet is to be a thorn in society's side.

Never let them forget their past fuck-ups. Always point out their present errors and predict the worst for our future. Hope it won't come true, but leave the threat out there.

If you read anything I post at MySpace you've seen, recently, History Remembers, comparing Bush to Nixon. Just one example of what I'm talking about. Yesterday I posted Pulling a Woman out of a Hat, directed at all politicians.

Of course, I'm not very popular.

I've mentioned this to a few of you but a couple of weeks ago I went to Chicago and did a slam contest. My brother said, "Don't do the political shit, they hate it. Do the funny stuff."
Right. I did the political shit, they hated it.

But political can be subtle and that's why the one fellow asked if we could name five political poems. Sure, but you might not think of them as political. I mean, if a poem deals with an issue that effects two or more people, isn't it political?

But Carl Sandburg wrote a lot of political poems, like Grass, Chicago, The Hangman at Home, Smoke and Steel, oh, and Death Snips Proud Men, very good. And that's just a smidgen from one author.

Michael Grover:  Yeah Dave I host a reading and after the last one some new guy came up to me and said my poems are funny and political. I told him they had to be, or people wouldn't listen. They don't want to hear the truth. I have won slams with political poems that were funny. But yeah if you want to reach people you have to mix humor in to make them more acceptable. That is just my experiance if you really want something to go over.

Zachary C. Bush:  Well, I enjoyed what most everyone shared so far, however, I can most relate with Misti and Miles over a few points that they brought up. I am paraphrasing, but Misti mentioned that she wrote about life and the things around her. Simple and agreed!

& I especially enjoyed Miles comments about his conversation with S.A. over the lack of "political poems" (outside of Mike's, of which I admire greatly for doing things that we do not see as much of) when he quoted Roland Barthes (?) who said this:

"writing is in itself a political act. Change the world by changing yourself."

This is right on for me, especially that last line. I also think Mike told me that once in a previous conversation that all writing is "political" when it is honest and meant/intended/or does, in reality, move others to think in a new sort of way or somehow be emotionally affected. I am a big fan of Lorca and will go out and check that poem that...I believe Mike mentioned?

Nice discussion. I am not sure if what I said made any sense, but all is well.

Cheers,
ZCB

Michael Grover:  Zach I believe what I told you that was what Ian McKaye told me once. And it was true. But let us face facts. There is war going on and innocent people are dying and we as poets can sit around with our heads in the sand and act like it's not happening, or we can project uncomfortable subjects into the public domain. I choose to do the later. If we don't stand for something then we stand for nothing.

Kathy Polenberg:  Yes- they make a difference and no I can't name five famous. I don't think being remembered is the point as much as speaking to the present. That is something I do in readings with my poems on the mental health care crisis and I speak from first-hand experience. I toss the poem away or hand my copy to someone else and have faith. I know I have caused some ripple effect in some younger poets - who shared with me stories of mental illness and discrimination/victimization and then wrote poetry about them. They will not become famous either.
My "political" stuff is hard to place in the online "underground" (one overtly political poem went into NerveHouse #1 printed in Wisconsin) when they have mental illness references. So those I put out there live- and I trust they breathe for at least one night.
They (political protest poems) make an evolutionary difference that might not become apparent for generations - or ages - but when they are formed, and then offered into the environment - they must be adapted to by the author and reader, even if unconsciously, just as we adapt to the earths atmospheric changes and tectonic plates shifting.

Miles J. Bell:  I agree up to a point, but personally I find I can get my outrage & "worldview" about the things happening in the world a lot better by conversations. I'm a poet in that I write poems, but ONLY when I write poems. I'm just another human when I'm not. It would feel like the wrong way of doing things if I started to let the bigger political points into what I write. I couldn't write a protest song, either, or paint a "Guernica". Doesn't mean I'm not angry and outraged and passionate about certain things in the world. Just because I can write doesn't mean I'm honour-bound in some way to write about everything I think.

If that all sounds really mean, flippant or dismissive it's not meant that way. Not to denigrate anyone else's modus operandi. Different strokes for different folks, etc.

Aleathia Drehmer:  Miles--I get what you are saying about still feeling outrage and frustration and injustice about the things that go on in the world today. I am a very sensitive person to all of that and most of the time I have to shield myself from it because it makes me severely depressed. I have in my day tried to write about the atrocities of the world but I get lost in the probability that my voice getting lost among the masses, that it would not be strong enough to call attention. I have always been a behind the scene person when it comes to finding solutions and for bringing things to light. I would much rather do the organizing and let someone else to the shouting and fist pumping and sign carrying. That is not for me. I can not seem to formulate big subjects of a political nature into words. I tend to like to write about the little people that no one will ever meet, to show how the world's burden is their burden only smaller.

Michael Grover:  Cool Miles, we're all individuals. For me just because I put down a pen or stopped punching keys on a computer that does not mean that I have stopped being a poet. It's kind of a 24-7 job. That's just me man. I have been waken from sleeps by poems. It's almost like I don't write them, they just come to me. Over the years I have learned how to make them come most of the time. There is no switch that I can turn on and off. I'm very prolific. I write a lot. I choose to though.

David Blaine:  Ah, yes Miles, I agree with Mike. You are a poet with or without pen in hand. The birth of a poem, or the discovery, depending on your poetics, takes place in stages and just because you're not writing a poem doesn't mean you stop being a poet.

When I look back at the long time in the middle of my life when I didn't write any poems, I can see now that I was still a poet. I was always trying to explain things to people in metaphors and similes. Always trying to get them to understand abstract ideas in the concrete images of something else.

And as for political, sometimes things hurt so bad that I ignore them. Not because I accept them, not because I'm apathetic, but because I feel like I'll explode. I stopped subscribing to the newspaper. I rarely watch the national news. I've come to the conclusion that everything is going to go on like it has for the last thousand or so years, no matter what the minority of concerned citizens do to protest.

And I've come to the conclusion that the majority, the voters who put the assholes into office, are idiots. They drink the fucking Kool Aid and pull the lever. They don't get our poems anyway. And the ones who do hate us for them.

Michael Grover:  If I can add one more thing. I've seen Saul Williams live a few times. One time in particular he told the crowd as poets we all fish from the same well, just from different yards. I thought that was pretty damn prolific.

J. Ryberg:  This is probably going to be an unpopular opinion, but, I think most political poems are inherently cursed with short life spans/expiration dates by their very nature, their timely-ness. More often than not, they are the literary equivalent of a passionate letter-to-the-editor. However, that's not necessarily a reason to not write them and it doesn't invalidate them as an artistic work. Sometimes it's just gotta be done. But, what, more often than not, is being done by the act? Self affirmation? Catharsis? Airing one's grievances to the universe and /or a roomful of like-minded people? I guess I've become kind of cynical, but I think the only way of even having a chance in hell at getting a message of any kind to "the people" is by subtly insinuating it into music and movies. The people that need to be "dosed" with knowledge basically have to be spoon fed, i.e. tricked into taking their medicine. People don't read anymore and they sure as shit don't read poetry and they probably don't wander into poetry readings. Oh well. I need a damn drink now.

Michael Grover:  Ah but you left out the intention behind political poems which is probably the most important thing.

Karl Koweski:  This is a very interesting topic. I'm almost leery to jump in due to the fact that in the immortal words of my brother, Steve, I'm actually for the war, but against the troops fighting it. My 2 ton Ford runs on gasoline... not Iraqi health and good will. That said, there's no doubting there's a place for politics in poetry. If any thing poetry puts a human face to those who pay the consequences of the decisions made by the corporate entities blah blah blah. I do think we have to hold political poetry up to the same standards of any other poetry. It has to be well-written. Too many people think just by saying fuck bush, you have a good political poem. I gotta say also, Miles bringing up that he's only a poet when he sits down to write poetry got me thinking. I'd like to hear more opinions about that. When I look in the mirror, I don't think now there's one handsome writer. But then I don't think there's one handsome factory worker, either. However, every time I sit down to write I'm bringing with me all my experiences from every moment I'm not at the desk.

Aleathia Drehmer:  I want to thank everyone that has participated this week in the roundtable. Your opinions continue to make me think of writing and of the world in new ways.

Last update : 11-09-2007 20:23

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