Politics in Poetry

I once wrote a blog post for Cleveland Poetics suggesting that politics does not belong in poetry.  I distinctly remember an open mic reading in which a young man stated that he was a veteran, and proceeded to read a poem or two that he had written about his war experiences in the Middle East.  The poet who immediately followed him read a piece that was vehemently anti-war and anti-the current republican government.  Shortly after, the young veteran stormed out, and to my knowledge, has never been seen since at a poetry reading in Cleveland.

Stock photo from Pexels

At the time I wrote the essay, I believed politics was the cause, politics was driving people away from poetry.  We’re making everything too political and can’t we all just kum-bay-ah our way through poetry?
I don’t regret writing that essay now, but I have changed my stance.  It’s important to remember that people can change, people can hold one idea that may evolve over time based on experience or interaction with others.  It is even possible for us to hold two or more contradicting ideas in our heads at the same time, to grapple with them and try to work out the complexities of the issues and ideologies we can be faced with every day.  Life is not binary; neither do anyone's ideas about important issues need to be.  It is a very human experience to learn about points of view different than your own and to then cobble together a new opinion on a topic where you once believed or felt something entirely different.  God gave us big brains to do this, to have ideas, to see facts and process facts, and then use those facts to formulate new ideas.  We don’t need to cling to an idea we held 20 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, or heck, even yesterday, for the rest of our lives.  That is counter to the lifelong mental and emotional growth we as human beings are supposed to undergo.

Unfortunately, it seems to be a very contemporarily digital social experience to never be able to consider more than the one thought you have conditioned yourself to hold and have held, excluding any and all new information.

I say all this because my poetry lately has been predominated by political themes.  I can’t seem to write much of anything without it turning into a commentary on politics and social issues.  Life in America in 2018 feels like an inherently political experience if you are paying attention to anything happening nationally or globally.  Even in the personal relationships where I know discussing anything political would cause some angst so I try to keep things neutral, it still squeaks its ugly head into conversation every now and then.

When life is political, art can’t help but be political, too.  When politics affects you personally, when laws and applied policies directly affect the lives of you and your neighbors, there is no longer a line that can be drawn between politics and everything else.  And the truth is, life is and always has been political, whether some of us have been isolated enough [waves hand] in the past to ignore that fact or not.

But to circle back to that open mic reading, it wasn’t politics that was the problem that day.  Politics didn’t drive that young man away.  It was a lack of reading the room, a lack of compassion, a lack of sensitivity in that moment.  That temporal tone-deafness is also something that I and probably everyone else reading this has also been guilty of at some point in our lives.

Where am I going with this ramble?  Here’s what I can conclude right here, right now:  write whatever you want, read whatever you want, create whatever you want.  But let’s all work on making sure that we create out of awareness, and hopefully, love.  Now, love can encompass anger, and frustration, and a lot of other “negative” emotions, but I hope we can create out of love.

But who knows, tomorrow, I might find reason to change my mind.