I’m writing this on Tuesday, November 6, Election Day. Full disclosure, today I will vote to reelect the president. As John F. Kennedy once said, “You can milk a cow the wrong way once and still be a farmer, but vote the wrong way on a water tower and you can be in trouble.”
So, whatever may be happening after today, and I hope the election is resolved, if you’re looking for some serious respite from the post-mortem and the voting stress, just remember two things: first, elections have consequences and they are real and, second, there are just 1,461 days until Election Day 2016 — I’m talking to you, Hillary Clinton.
In the meantime, Poetry Wire is ready to unwind a little from what has been, unfortunately, an uninspiring campaign all around.
And yet: it is Election Day! We vote in the most soulless fashion out here in Oregon — by mail — though we are stubborn in this household. Our tradition is that we personally drop off our ballots on Election Day itself. And by drop off I mean we slip our sealed envelopes into a mailbox-like container that sits outside, and is monitored by, the county elections office up the street.
Certainly Election Day is democracy’s form of mythologizing itself. It’s democracy’s most idealized poem. So Poetry Wire’s general election fever has not entirely receded. In that spirit here are nine political lyric poems you must know before you die. listed in alphabetical order by title (sorry, Homer and Publius Virgilius Maro, epics are restricted from the list).
“A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto” by Czezlaw Milsoz. The most important poem of our time to dramatize the severities of civilization’s guilt and state-sponsored murder.
“Baltics” by Tomas Transtromer. It defines a social consciousness coming awake in the world, a consciousness that threads both the political and interior moment.
“Diving into the Wreck” by Adrienne Rich. All the while it buries one poetic tradition, it births another into existence. Its irrefutable argument assimilates, integrates, and overcomes one identity for another and inspires more than feminist flowering. I mean, it un-ruins the ruins. A poem the world will be reading for centuries.
“For the Union Dead” by Robert Lowell. There are days I believe that this is the best American political poem of the 20th century. Yes, best. It combines confessional urgency with historical judgment. Its confrontation of race carved between New England’s Protestant-Catholic divide dramatizes the progressive experience of seething. Don’t be fooled: That kind of utterance is nearly impossible to pull off without collapsing into partisan cant.
“Howl” by Allen Ginsburg. For real, this poem gets better with age. It is the most Occupy Poetry poem of the last sixty years. It glorifies the marginalized and the revolutionary. All the while, like Whitman’s “Lilacs” poem, it is also an elegy and full of broken-hearted yearn-age.
“I, Too, Sing America” by Langston Hughes. How Hughes renders defiance as surprise makes this one of the most elegant political poems in our language.
“Requiem” by Anna Akhmatova. It translates one woman’s political suffering into a lyric utterance. It confirms one nation’s bout with its own terror. And more: it defines harrow and anguish into myth.
“The Second Coming” by W. B. Yeats. This poem eviscerates the idea that political poetry must be occasional. It is of political experience not about one. Though it is strangely difficult to summarize or paraphrase, the political consciousness in this poem, certainly fearful of power, is also an aesthetic sculpture of lyric purity.
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” by Walt Whitman. It is nearly a perfect elegy — an elegy as ars poetica even — defining both Republic and private loss. The section about Union and Confederate soldiers returning to their disembodied agrarian lives while the 16th president lies in state as the last casualty of the war is Whitman at his most interiorly bardic fineness.
That’s a round nine. Yes, yes, Poetry Wire concedes: lots of great political poems didn’t make the list. Please don’t shoot the messenger.
Instead: How about this? Poetry Wire invites you to add your Political Poems You Must Read Before You Die in the comments section below. And, please, spread the word to others to do the same.
What are your nominations for political poems we all must read before we die? Or, at least, before the next Iowa Straw Poll takes place, scheduled for the second Saturday in August in 2016.
27 responses
This list is wonderful, thank you. I would add two of my favorites: “Immigrant Blues” by Li-Young Lee and “More Light! More Light!” by Anthony Hecht.
Thomas Hardy’s “Channel Firing” is one of my favorites, and not just because of the line “The glebe cow drooled.” Marge Piercy’s “Barbie Doll” is intensely political and powerful even now, 30+ years after its publication. I have more, but I’ll wait to see if others comment.
“The Powwow at the End of the World” by Sherman Alexie.
Thomas McGrath’s “Ode to the American Dead in Asia,” W.H Auden’s “In Time of War.”
I love those already posted and mentioned. “The Bridge Poem” by Kate Rushin came right to mind, as did Essex Hemphill’s “American Wedding” and W.H. Auden’s “The Shield of Achilles.” However, for this 2012 election, I can’t help but think of a poet I was only recently introduced to by one of my wonderful mentors in the Rainier Writing Workshop at PLU: So, here is the link to Zbigniew Herbert’s “From the Top of the Stairs.”
http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/zbigniew-herbert/from-the-top-of-the-stairs/
“The Book of Yolek” by Anthony Hecht and “Brazil, January 1, 1502” by Elizabeth Bishop.
I’d like to add Auden’s “September 1, 1939” to your list.
To use your phrase, David, “1939” doesn’t collapse into “partisan cant.” It speaks about a particular historical moment and bespeaks momentous literary and philosophical concerns. If we disregard Auden’s late-in-life rejection of the famous last line in his penultimate stanza, we have the doozy, “We must love one another or die.” Rather than stating an untruth, as Auden thought: that, whether we love one another or not, we will die, this line is infinitely ponderable. So is the rest of Auden’s chilling, cathartic 99-liner that looks at politics through a glass brilliantly. You must read this poem–or die!
I would like to add César Vallejo’s “Trilce”. Taken as an expression of liberty without claim, it strikes me as one overtone of a political fundamental. Excellent list!
‘Exxon’ by Robert Wrigley …
Denise Levertov’s ‘What Were They Like’ should be there — a wonderful poem.
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/what-were-they-like/
“A Ritual to Read to Each other” by William Stafford. It reminds me of my obligations as a member of the human race.
Two of the very greatest poltiical poems are Yeats’s “Easter 1916” and Andrew Marvell’s “Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland”–great because the poets have such complicated feelings about their personal and political enemies. As Yeats wrote (in prose), “we make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric; and out of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.”
“Restless” by Li-Young Lee
“Dear Shahid,” by Agha Shahid Ali
WisÅ‚awa Szymborska, “Vermeer” jumps out:
So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum
in painted quiet and concentration
keeps pouring milk day after day
from the pitcher to the bowl
the World hasn’t earned
the world’s end.
“Death Fugue” by Paul Celan http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16961 & “All Their Stanzas Look Alike” by Thomas Sayers Ellis http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/238666 .
“I Do Not” by Michael Palmer http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poem/item/22050
“Boy Breaking Glass” by Gwendolyn Brooks http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172094
“What Kind of Times Are These” by Adrienne Rich http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181516
“Children of the Epoch” by Wislawa Szymborska
And how could we leave out Yusef Komunyakaa’s heartbreaking “Facing It”?
“Dulce et Decorum Est”: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175898
and a companion piece, “The Age Demanded”:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176680
Great poems, David. I would have concurred with every single one. And how about: “Innocence” by Thom Gunn.
“Arms and the Boy” by Wilfred Owen
“The Eagle That is Forgotten” by Vachel Lindsay
And I have a soft spot in my hear for Thomas Dewey’s little-known victory song:
Congratulations, Tom Dewey!
You won in a landslide today.
We knew you would win
Through thick and through thin
‘Cause no one would vote
To let Truman stay in.
Congratulations, Tom Dewey!
Your Republican dreams will come true.
Here’s a victory roar
For president thirty-four!
The White House is waiting for you!
No list of political poems would be complete without Yeats’s political wish for a life devoid of “politics”:
Politics
HOW can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here’s a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war’s alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!
–William Butler Yeats
Imagine the Angels of Bread
This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.
This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will
that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.
If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.
So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.
MartÃn Espada
Poet, Essayist, Editor & Translator
from Imagine the Angels of Bread
This morning, a week later, I want to add Jack Gilbert’s “A Brief for the Defense” to the list: “We must admit there will be music despite everything.”
Thanks for a great post, and for the excellent responses it generated.
Well done, David. Excellent choices. I approve.
Mom
THE CRACKDOWN
by Glyn Maxwell
We know what you’re out there up to.
You’re up to the evil that has to be put a stop to.
We know why you do it, too.
You’re bad inside. There’s bad, and it got in you.
You won’t get what you want.
We’re decent and we don’t always get what we want,
But you’ll get the opposite.
You’ll get ten, twenty years of not having it.
So will the ones you love.
So will the ones you sob at your photos of.
So will the dump you’re from.
Be blue light of the 21st century, chum,
The day you hobble free. Free?
Too good for you, that. Not good enough for me..
“In God We Trust”, WHAT?
Why do we have “In God We Trust”
When from the top down they’re so unjust
Their god is themselves and their evil ways
Lying and cheating, but numbered are their days
Polls are the manipulation of the politician
To distort and twist is their planned mission
They exempt themselves of their own laws
Our government corrupt and full of flaws
Putting the weight of oppression on US
Republican or Democrat I don’t trust
They put on an act, so opposed to each other
Laughing at US, while US they smother
We must uphold “In God We Trust”
While lies, stealing, and death they thrust
I’m not anti-government as you might think
I oppose the corruption that really does stink
Working for US, support and defend the Constitution
Sadly not true, they’re for sale, it’s called prostitution
They’re bringing about their own destruction
Misleading US with a false seduction
Suffocating, buried in debt over the years
Our government “the People” it no longer fears
Dishonest people our government pays to distract
Never about the truth, it’s all just an act
Our media is evil and carries much blame
Lies and manipulation, just doing the same
When it all hit’s the fan there’s one thing I know
True Americans will fight, and make a great show
When it’s all over, said, and done
“In God We Trust” will have won
By Ron Evartt
Note: When I said, “but numbered are their days”, I’m speaking about how they bring about their own destruction, with all their evil ways. I would not go after them, but would defend my country, family, and friends if they ever come for us!
God HATES sin, but sent His Son to die for all!
I HATE the corruption, but government is important. We need to go back to “In God We Trust”, and the intentions of our founding fathers.
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