Kickass political poems
 

On John Whitworth's thread on Accomplished Members Rose Kelleher wrote:
I'm sure there have been such threads but I haven't been able to trace one in a brief search this morning. So here's a new one. If anyone finds an old one, maybe they could provide a link in this thread.

Let's start with one of the poems mentioned by John, which he himself acknowledges as a powerful sonnet:

And just to stir things up a little, here's one by John himself, from his volume Being the Bad Guy:

Thank you, Gregory. I am honoured. It has to be said that a verse making fun of George Dubbya is scarcely a fearless political act in the UK. Indeed one praising him would be much more like that. I was much more intrigued by the form I had created. Similarly, Shelley was risking nothing. Good poem though.

Thanks for this thread, Gregory. The repetends of this anti-war villanelle will never leave my mind:

"Newsphoto: Basra, Collateral Damage," by Steve Kowit.

To continue some points made down on John's AM thread: I note that this one, like Owen's "Dulce et Decorum" drums its own moral points at the end. But I think the straight reportage does the work.

John Haines, whose death was recently announced over on GT, wrote a number of political poems--including a satirical series called "Diogenes in Washington" which I can't find in my books.

I found this late poem of his, "Notes on the Capitalist Persuasion", online.

He was a good friend of Hayden Carruth and Wendell Berry, two other poets who were/are outspoken about politics in their poetry.

(Editing back in to add that I don't think this is a particularly memorable poem, and in fact is a good example of some of the pitfalls of writing political poetry. So I guess it only fits half the description of this thread--it's political but not kickass. John H. did write some kickass political stuff as well, but I don't have time to find it or type it in at the moment.)

Here's one of the most famous poems by Claude McKay, a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance:


If We Must Die

If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, O let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
O kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies an open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!

xxxxx- Claude Mckay

A wee one that packs a wallop:

The Golf Links
by Sarah Norcliffe Parker


The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
.

so many....here's three
 

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939
by W.H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.


~~~
Why, sir, I trust I may have leave to speak;
And speak I will; I am no child, no babe:
Your betters have endured me say my mind,
And if you cannot, best you stop your ears.
My tongue will tell the anger of my heart,
Or else my heart concealing it will break,
And rather than it shall, I will be free
Even to the uttermost, as I please, in words.

- The Taming of the Shrew

~~~

euridice

all the male poets write of orpheus
as if they look back & expect
to find me walking patiently
behind them. they claim i fell into hell.
damn them, i say.
i stand in my own pain
& sing my own song.

- Alta

~~~
PS: Love Whitworth's above.

I thought this thread would stir some response - just as John's original thread and essay did. Thanks, everyone, for joining in. Here's another classic:


Thomas Hood
The Song of the Shirt

With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread--
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch
She sang the "Song of the Shirt."

"Work! work! work!
While the cock is crowing aloof!
And work — work — work,
Till the stars shine through the roof!
It's Oh! to be a slave
Along with the barbarous Turk,
Where woman has never a soul to save,
If this is Christian work!

"Work — work — work
Till the brain begins to swim;
Work — work — work
Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Band, and gusset, and seam,
Till over the buttons I fall asleep,
And sew them on in a dream!

"Oh, Men, with Sisters dear!
Oh, Men, with Mothers and Wives!
It is not linen you're wearing out,
But human creatures' lives!
Stitch — stitch — stitch,
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
Sewing at once with a double thread,
A Shroud as well as a Shirt.

But why do I talk of Death?
That Phantom of grisly bone,
I hardly fear its terrible shape,
It seems so like my own —
It seems so like my own,
Because of the fasts I keep;
Oh, God! that bread should be so dear,
And flesh and blood so cheap!

"Work — work — work!
My Labour never flags;
And what are its wages? A bed of straw,
A crust of bread — and rags.
That shatter'd roof — and this naked floor —
A table — a broken chair —
And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank
For sometimes falling there!

"Work — work — work!
From weary chime to chime,
Work — work — work!
As prisoners work for crime!
Band, and gusset, and seam,
Seam, and gusset, and band,
Till the heart is sick, and the brain benumb'd,
As well as the weary hand.

"Work — work — work,
In the dull December light,
And work — work — work,
When the weather is warm and bright —
While underneath the eaves
The brooding swallows cling
As if to show me their sunny backs
And twit me with the spring.

Oh! but to breathe the breath
Of the cowslip and primrose sweet —
With the sky above my head,
And the grass beneath my feet
For only one short hour
To feel as I used to feel,
Before I knew the woes of want
And the walk that costs a meal!

Oh! but for one short hour!
A respite however brief!
No blessed leisure for Love or Hope,
But only time for Grief!
A little weeping would ease my heart,
But in their briny bed
My tears must stop, for every drop
Hinders needle and thread!"

With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread —
Stitch! stitch! stitch!
In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
And still with a voice of dolorous pitch, —
Would that its tone could reach the Rich! —
She sang this "Song of the Shirt!"

Another political--or socioeconomic, anyway--shirt poem:

http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/pinsky/shirt.php

I heard Pinsky read this beautifully at the only poetry reading I've ever attended, more than two decades ago. (Yeah, I don't get out much.)



Digression:

Later, when I was a law librarian, I helped a student research the Triangle Shirtwaist Trial of 1911. If you want to get really, really, REALLY angry, page down to Kate Alterman's testimony on this page and check out Max D. Steuer's cross-examination of her, which was central to the ludicrous "not guilty" verdict in the manslaughter trial of the co-owners. Proof that over-rehearsing what you're going to say in court can backfire spectacularly. Damages were settled for an average of just $75 per life lost. Yes, they were 1911 dollars, but still.

http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/project...ngletest1.html

[The cross-examination of Lena Yaller is shorter, but makes the defense's same point about the witnesses for the prosecution having been too well-coached:

Steuer--Do you think you could tell those words over - you could tell them in the same words again?
A--I could tell them ten times.
Q-- How many times have you told this in the same words before? How many times, Miss Yaller, have you told it in the same words before?
A-- I have told it about five times, first to my friends, then to the District Attorney, before the Grand Jury, and now, about four or five times. I can remember it now.
Q-- All right, thank you very much. ]

The implication being that none of these harrowing, damning, eyewitness stories about the consequences of the company's locked door policy should be believed by the jury, because they were just a little too practiced.

One more political-ish poem from the 1990s, and then duty calls:

DID THE WOMAN SAY

Did the woman say,
When she held him for the first time in the dark of a stable,
After the pain and the bleeding and the crying,
‘This is my body, this is my blood’?

Did the woman say,
When she held him for the last time in the dark rain on a hilltop,
After the pain and the bleeding and the dying,
‘This is my body, this is my blood’?

Well that she said it to him then,
For dry old men,
Brocaded robes belying barrenness,
Ordain that she not say it for him now.

--Frances Croake Frank