ENGAGEMENT, AGAIN

By and large, political poetry—poetry responding to national or global events, poetry of “engagement” or even “witness”—was not the norm in the United States through the 20th century. When it was written and when it was read, critical reception was hostile. Are these assertions controversial? Surely, it is too much to say, as Lawrence Ferlinghetti said at the time, that poetry before Sept. 11, 2001, was B.S., and that everything after was A.S., but he was right in saying that 9/11 changed things. So was Amit Majmudar, who, in his introduction to Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, writes, “As it did to so many of my generation, 9/11 broke a stupor that should have been broken well before” (xiii). So was Tracy K. Smith when she recounted her experience as a creative writing student in the 1990s, when everyone was admonished “to avoid composing political poems,” and how after 9/11, “something shifted in the nation’s psyche.”¹

Yet one keeps having this conversation: The claim that American poetry has become more political in recent times, which it demonstrably has done, meets with the objection that poetry has always been political. (Smith’s article, for example, prompted a wave of protest on a number of poets’ Facebook pages.) If we speak only of the United States, the objection is unfounded. Is American poetry more public in the 21st century than it was through most of the twentieth? Is it more political? Does it address current trends and events? The answers are yes, yes, and far more than ever. During the long arc from one fin de siècle to the other, the idea of a politically engaged poetry was overwhelmingly held in disfavor. Those who grew up during the Cold War may find this obvious, in no need of argument. But, in fairness, there are two particular claims to support the idea that American poetry has always been political, and they can be quickly reviewed:

First, Fredric Jameson was right: the political allegory is there beneath the most trivial TV sitcom, beneath the most Oulipian procedural poetry, beneath the uplifting poetry of Mary Oliver, or the sentimental poetry of the Instagram poet Rupi Kaur (at present, by a staggering margin, the most read poet in the world). But to say that all poetry is political in this sense is like saying that all language is ironic, after which we have to retire the concept of irony (or of politics) as useless. When everything is blue, blue ceases to exist.

Second, certainly there were often engaged poets in the 20th century. Carl Sandburg’s , written during the Great Depression and read through the mid-century, was popular—before the word “socialist” had become as vituperative as it did after World War II, when the phrase “the people” was dropped from popular circulation. Muriel Rukeyser, around the mid-20th century, was, for many of us, one of the foremost of these poets, documenting labor struggles in the South, the trial of the Scottsboro boys, the Spanish Civil War; Kenneth Rexroth wrote about it too, as did Edwin Rolfe—poet laureate of the Lincoln Brigade—but in poems virtually no anthology included or includes even now. “American Writers against the Vietnam War” was founded by the poets David Ray and Robert Bly in 1965, a group that included W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Robert Lowell, and others. Ginsberg was, for most of his life, the target of calumny and the butt of cultural jokes about “beatniks.” (Ginsberg’s good cheer in the face of unrelenting hostility may be one of his greatest legacies.) His “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” published in 1966, is a long antiwar poem, essentially a collage derived from the car radio while the poet and his friend drove across the Midwest. Bob Kaufman—“the black Rimbaud,” as he was called in Europe, where he had more of a readership than he did in the U.S.—came West with William Burroughs and Ginsberg to join Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, and others, who, along with the San Francisco Renaissance, were establishing the Bay Area as a new center for counter-cultural One thinks also of Robert Duncan’s poem about LBJ, or of Robinson Jeffers’s regrettable poems about Roosevelt (“the vanity of the cripple,” etc.). Later, we can add Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Amiri Baraka (né Leroi Jones), late Adrienne Rich, or Robert Bly’s poems about the Bushes. However, in these latter cases we are creeping into the 21st century. Indeed, Bly’s poems on the Bushes, Rich’s on Iraq, Baraka’s on 9/11—the later poems of all these poets—are all 21st century.