Reading David Ray’s entry for Poet’s Bookshelf 2 reminded me that my editorial bias might be affected by the fact that every time I think again about the question of whether poets have a general responsibility to address contemporary issues, I end up thinking, yes. Certainly I have thought so in my own writing life—which I bring to my editing—and this has been an important aspect of my sense of what it is to be a poet. So I’m going to indulge myself in some paragraphs of trying to figure out what, exactly, I think about this.

The question is not whether effective poetry can be accomplished when addressing an issue. Clearly the art of poetry in America was not weakened by, to offer merely a few classics among many many examples: Bly’s “Counting Small-boned Bodies”, Dunbar’s “Sympathy”, and “We Wear the Mask”, Forche’s “The Colonel”, Francis’s “Light Casualties,” McKay's "If We Must Die", Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck”, Stafford’s “At the Bomb Testing Site“, and Ginsberg and Dylan and much good Rap and much satirical poetry from minority points of view, and on and on. Rather, American culture would be anemic without them.

The question is: does being a poet carry a responsibility to address crucial contemporary issues, such as (to use examples from Thoreau’s essay) slavery, unjust warfare. Clearly genocide would be another. And I’ll add degradation of the environment, atomic weaponry, and subversion of our democracy, by e.g. political chicanery, or promotion of discrimination.

To begin my attempt to reach a clear editorial position, I’ll posit two ideas that I personally and editorially take as givens:

(1) Each human life is more valuable to humanity than any work of art, and human community is more valuable to humanity than the aggregate of works of art (I think that this is true both inherently, because of the built-in, species drive for preservation, and existentially, as we have created ourselves valuable through actions such as the creation of art—I might be in over my head here, but it’s a thought). Art is primarily valuable because of the kind of (very)human behavior that it is, in relation to the nature and value of human life (here I have the cover of Aristotle).

(2) In view of the millennia of poetry that we know, there is no point in laying down rules about what poetry can or cannot, must or must not, be or do. In art as well as in life in general, rules and generalizations not only have exceptions, and provoke exceptions, but often are abused by persons with counter-purposes.

Well then I guess it follows rather easily from those propositions that (1) poetry should, at least in dire straits, be put to the service of human wellbeing, and (2) any sense of responsibility for addressing controversial human social behavior (and the individuals or groups who behave that way) through one’s practice of the art would have to be voluntary.

Should I join the call for volunteers?

First, over on the opposite bank of my own thinking, I do find art-for-art’s-sake attractive, and even an essential ingredient of the integrity of the art, especially in times when society or the prevailing poetic wind presses for didacticism and such, which Modernism has turned my taste against.

Emerson, who wrote passionately that he would not obey the Fugitive Slave Act, wrote in “The Rhododendron”: “Beauty is it’s own excuse for being.”—agreed. Pound wrote in an early letter addressing the issue of Whitman: “For beauty IS an accusation.”—agreed. In fact, the point would be to construct a powerful aesthetic experience, a variety of beauty, against destruction.

The existence of effective poetry (all those amazing poems), being effective beauty, moves against acts of destruction, even if indirectly. We all (writers and readers) participate in that motion. For instance poems can counter discrimination by providing material (and an imagination of life) that counters prejudice. Many effective poems that do not directly address issues express aspects of life that are not at issue, but provide the perspective within which we recognize what makes an important issue, an especially destructive act.

So I’m allowing for an excellent poet who never explicitly addresses an issue. A major example is the work of my most favorite poet, Dickinson, who seems not to have addressed slavery or the civil war (although some scholars are seeing evidence that the violence of warfare was weighing on her poetic expression).

But when I think about the nature of the human impulses to language, art, and poetry—impulses to imagination and creation, individual and group expression, pleasure, beauty, love, truthfulness, preservation of life, community, celebration, seemingly transcendent dimensions of reality—it seems to me that to be a poet and not accept a responsibility to address the most destructive acts of one’s time, as best one can, is to make oneself an anomaly—albeit a miraculous anomaly like Dickinson.

For we are members of a species that imagines paradise and creates beauty, and is predatory and self-predatory. I think that we must struggle against our own social predation (from the Latin for taking booty). In fact we must strike against injustice and destruction with the best means available, not because we can create paradise but because we must prevent fools from creating a hell.

And even though, as Haki Madhubuti put it: “A poem never stopped a tank,” poetry can be an especially powerful means of countering predatory behavior, by provoking clarification of thought (in the holistic sense of the word) and values, and moving people to action. It seems to me that persons who are talented in the art of poetry should employ that means in direct attack against forces working for destruction.

I believe that as persons we should accept responsibility to address crucial issues, and I believe that individuals should not separate their being as persons from their being as poets. Can I personally accept such responsibility, and not want to address such an issue, in an action—writing poetry—that is so important in my life?

Yes (on the opposite bank again), if I find that I am not capable of addressing it effectively in poetry. And that can result from personal disposition. The creative process is such that a poet may well need to bring a certain energy of outrage to the craft, in order to create powerful poetry on a given subject. But I should give it a try (and sometimes a body of less-than-first-rate poems by many poets contributes to the movement against a wrong). If I try, and fall short, I must find another way of personally being a friction in the machinery of injustice, as Thoreau would have it. And I think, with Thoreau, that there are certain injustices that we can recognize quite clearly, and confidently resist. If we do not resist, people must wonder why we failed.

I also agree, deeply, as person, poet, and editor, with Whitman, that one of the great imaginings, and one of the great “poems” of our time, is the American collective imagining (partly through poetry) of a greater American democracy—such as Thoreau had “imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.” I confidently join the call for volunteers in the construction of that poem.

But then, over on the other bank again, I remember that there are risks when poets decide to address social issues—risks to society and to the art. Poets have produced things of beauty that moved, explicitly or implicitly, destructively. For instance there was the politics of another of my favorite poet’s, Pound, who got in over his head, and whose anti-Semitism (and Eliot’s) reminds us that we must always remember that we are sometimes mistaken, and that our mistakes can be damaging. Generations of male chauvinist poetry really hurt.

But a poet’s lack of political expertise does not necessarily disqualify. For instance, during the Mobe to end America’s military involvement in Vietnam, many thoughtful laypeople, among them poets, worked hard at educating themselves about Vietnam and the history of Euro-American involvement there; and they became better informed than were many leaders in the U.S. government. With that information they could see the magnitude of the error. Furthermore, because they were outside government, they did not think and act from a position of vested political, capitalist, and career interests.

There is of course the artistic risk of weakening the artistry, by slipping into didacticism, or ballooning up into propaganda and falsification, violating personal and artistic integrity.

Reading over this, I see that when I have thought about poems addressing issues, I have generally thought in terms of poems of resistance to injustice. A major example was that effort against U.S. warfare in Vietnam. Another is the ongoing effort against discrimination, which is also an effort in support of tolerance, diversity.

Most poets have not written many (if any) poems that address issues, and many poets devote little or no effort to explicitly addressing issues—from which I conclude that the weight of history falls against my argument that the art is inherently a matter of social responsibility.

And as for me as an independent editor/publisher, on the one hand most of the poems that I have published have not been issue oriented, and on the other hand I’m proud that Barnwood published Herz’s book of poems about the Holocaust.

At the end of this rumination, I still feel that it is an important aspect of the art of poetry that poets be imaginatively engaged with social issues, and consider themselves to be responsible for addressing crucial issues, within the scope of their individual talents (sometimes a body of less-than-first-rate poems by many poets contributes to the movement against a wrong).

I certainly wouldn’t insist that every poet write a protest poem, but I tend to think that all poets should consider the importance of resisting injustice to be a part of their artistic orientation toward art and life. I guess my editorial bias probably is that I’m favorably pre-disposed toward a poem that addresses an important contemporary issue (especially if I agree with the position that the poem takes), but I’m not likely to publish the poem unless I think it is aesthetically powerful.

Comments?

Tom Koontz, Editor
Barnwood magazine
Barnwood Press