Is Poetry a Form of Protest?
Picture this: I am a second year English student sitting in a typical university classroom. Beside me sits the only other black student in the room. The professor is condescending, as most professors are, and he asks the class a question, “Do you think that writing is a form of protest?” His class agreed with him promptly, like they were supposed to. I wasn’t so convinced. My entire life I’ve read poems that call the reader to arms; That posed important questions about race, class, colonialism, and oppression. However, I think it can be dangerous when one believes that writing like this does enough for the everyday person. I did not believe that writing a piece about something necessarily brings about any substantial change. My professor contested, “But what about bringing awareness to a subject? Is that not important?”
“It is important.” I replied, “But it is not enough.”
“You must have high expectations.” He said passively, and he continued with his lecture.
This encounter was at the forefront of my mind as I began grappling with this paper. I think, as writers, we want to believe that our writing means something, that it is important and can bring about some change in the world. Having good intentions is not the same as causing action, however. I began to inquire about the nature of activism and if poetry itself adheres to this definition. I’ve come to the conclusion that there must be another person or persons who individually read a work and take it upon themselves to do something about the words they have read. This dissonance between author and reader is where things become complicated.
As I began my research I thought to myself, ‘What are works I have not read yet that will change my life again?” I am in constant awe of writing, specifically poetry, in this way. I am always eager to be ripped apart and put back together again within the span of a page. However, a friend, similar to me in many ways cannot really understand what a poem means to me, what was communicated to me or how it changed me. Only I know. And I will never truly know how her favourite poem has changed her.
This is the mystery of poetry that has always fascinated me. Every poem written can be interpreted in different ways, because each of us has a unique lens in which we view the world. I admit in the past I have disregarded poetry I did not understand or that went over my head. But, now I think the poems with the most power are ones that I do not yet understand. Poetry, although written at a specific time and in a certain context, once it is on the page exists primarily in the mind of the reader. Therefore, I think it is too simple to say that poetry itself is a form of activism. The power, the accountability, the mystery, is transferred from poet to reader through the page. It is up to the reader to use this power in the real world to effect change. Claire Harris describes the power of poetry, the corruption of the poet, beautifully in her essay ‘Why Do I Write?” She writes:
“That is why I write poetry, poetic fiction, and not essays: for the fantasy at the centre of things, for the purity of the stripped-down hard-picked line, for the game at the heart of language. The world we have today is as much a result of these fantasies of God-like power, of wisdom and ease, as it is greed. For what is harder in our world than a missile, purer than our love of death, more careless than our exercise of power?”
It is the careless exercise of power that terrifies me, not the words themselves but the people who wrote them. There is immense power in writing that is abstract, like poetry. However. This power had been downplayed at times in my education.
I was first taught to read poetry in high school. My teacher told me it was like solving a puzzle, and this is where I first discovered the power of poetry. The pleasure I received from seeing checkmarks on my annotated poems was intoxicating. It was like I was finally being invited to the party. I realized that poetry was sacred because it was so wild, so free from the rigidity of formal English. I knew that there was nothing different in meaning between ‘A how yuh do?’ and ‘How are you?’, but my teachers berated me with red ink until all the verbs were conjugated and no clause was left behind. However, I held out hope, because of poetry. All the punctuation, the humiliation of a comma splice, the endless grammar rules meant nothing to the poem. There is something simply transcendent about a poem. To understand it means you understand others. Over the course of my short life I have, “…somehow figured out that words are durable, expansive, perhaps because I had understood their effects of creating… “fictions” about Africans in the New World. And I understood that these fictions took place regardless of the actual, real lives lived.” (Brand 16) Poetry was the cold, hard, slap in the face that fiction was never able to give me.
I often worry that writers believe that writing is enough to create change like my professor did those years ago. It is simply not enough for me. It is not enough to write about the hardships of your people, if you turn around and belittle them in your class. I cannot accept that. I come from the womb of a black woman, the most marginalized of them all (a similarly both me and my professor shared.) All my life I have seen people smile in her face, pose for the pictures, then ignore her on the street. I can see it all, I was baffled at how my professor could not see it, and words on a page are not enough to change my mind. There must be action coupled with the words or the words might as well be written in white ink.
I also worry about the constant state of change that poetry exists within. The real-world moves so much faster than the poem which implores you to sit and think and be at peace with one’s own internal monologue. The conversation is always changing, but poems stay the same, and the issues brought up seem to never change. In Refuse this is a common theme. I find it refreshing when poets acknowledge the disheartening fact that they are their hearts, just for the world to move on to the next tragedy of the day. Gwen Benaway says, “But the conversation is changing, Y’all/while the dead are still dead/and the missing still miss/the way home.” (Benaway 73) and she is correct.
This can be frustrating. This reminds us of our place in the world, as writers, “on corners, thinking one day/we’ll make it, delicately,/without a war, without the tragedy/of it all/and maybe with our bodies,/though now/ its too late for that.”(Brand 17) Tannis Macdolald expressed this as well writing, “My spilled ink floats/beneath your radar. Tell me again/ how it works.” Both excerpts from the Refuse Anthology, complicate the narrative that writing itself can bring about change. We must also think about who is reading the poems written. There are many people who believe they already know what the world is all about. They are immune to new perspectives, and different ways of looking at things. This is the main challenge in believing that poetry in itself is a form of activism. We must believe that poems don’t change people, people change people. And people only change if they want to change. Really, people only change if they have to.
In the duration of this writing this essay, I have realized two things about poetry. One, that publishing poetry is a complex political act in itself, and two that the poet has more power within them than I had previously thought possible.
“For me, literary activism means considering and challenging: who is being published? who is doing the publishing? what are the means of selection? of production? of distribution? who is the target audience? the actual audience?… I believe in the importance of these questions, and in the actions that emerge from engaging with them. But I also see the limits of literary activism, and the need for it to intersect with a multitude of activisms in order to realize substantial social change.” (Brandt) This fact of intersecting activisms is what can make poems have power, and in turn, gives poets their power as activists.
This is a complex issue and I see that the poet is in an advantageous position when It comes to activism. There is no ‘real’ money in writing poems, so it can be assumed that this makes it a better conduit for activism. The poet cannot be as corrupted, and therefore is placed in a special slot for ‘poet/activist’. These words are so entwined that I have never seen a poet not also put ‘activist’ in their social media bio. But, as illustrated in the before mentioned quote by Emily Brandt in relation to literary activism, the ability for poems to work as activism is limited.
I would like to conclude with the words of Dionne Brand, “…I keep writing poems; in full consciousness, in full consciousness, in full knowledge, I keep writing them. And in grudging recognition that the world will not now change in my lifetime, as much as I thought it might when I first began…” (Brand 27) I fear I have come across as a bit pessimistic, or that I have no faith in humanity, but I am simply trying to be realistic. The human ego can be exacerbated by writing and by poetry, and I think this is absurd. Each of us longs to make out mark on the world. We all want to be remembered, as a poet myself, I grapple with these thoughts. But it is reassuring that the poets I have come across also share my view. That poets are only conduits for transferring power, and the poems, words, do not have as much power as we like to think they do. I will continue to write poems that an audience might interpret as activist poetry because I am the one who must live the words, not just read them.
Works Cited
Benaway, Gwen. “But I Still Like.” Refuse:CanLit in Ruins, edited by Hannah McGregor, Julie Rak, and Erin Wunker 1st ed., Book*Hug, 2018. Pp. 72–75
Brand, Dionne. “A Kind of Perfect Speech.” Institute for Coastal Research, 2008.
Brandt, Emily. Interview. By Amy King. 18th August, 2015. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/08/what-is-literary-activism#:~:text=Every%20story%2C%20poem%2C%20and%20essay,as%20humans%20deserving%20human%20rights.&text=A%20few%20years%20ago%2C%20while,SKYPE%20in%20with%20the%20class.
Harris, Claire. “Why Do I Write?” Grammar of Dissent edited by Carol Morrell, Goose Lane Editions, 1994, pp. 30.
McDonald, Tannis . “How It Works” Refuse:CanLit in Ruins, edited by Hannah McGregor, Julie Rak, and Erin Wunker 1st ed., Book*Hug, 2018. Pp. 69–71.
