The Politicization of Poetry

(nb: in case you read an earlier verson, this blog entry has been changed, I felt the first entry didn't really adequately capture what I wanted to say.)

Just a year ago, I was very taken by the poetry of Adrienne Rich. She became my model as a writer and a thinker. There are many similarities and mutual influences in Rich’s and Rukeyser’s work. Both their voices are beautiful, passionate and urgent. Both set out with the project of rewriting an official history. We see moments of prosaic reality interspersed with lyrical bursts of song, the exploitation of the italic, the placement of the language of officialdom and capitalism into verses. The documentation of history through poetry doesn’t only illuminate history, it’s a subversive move that undermines officialdom and causes the language of officialdom to fall apart. The placement of official language into verse has the effect of fragmenting and satirizing it. It becomes integrated into the speaker’s consciousness and takes on a new voice. The title, “The book of the dead” aptly portrays the attempt to capture the voices of those who have been silenced. Writing, like embalming, serves an an act of preservation and a tribute to the dead.

I have ambivalent thoughts about the politicization of poetry, just as I have ambivalent thoughts about Adrienne Rich, and Alfian Sa’at, and any other political writer that I’ve read. Sa’at is a Singapore poet who has been labelled as a political activist. Sa’at writes about the contaminating influence of the shipwrecks that are washed onto shore on a sleepy island. Mario Petrucci sets out in his book Heavy Water to show the effect the Chernobyl disaster had on the people. Poison, radiation, debris—all become metaphors for the moral corruption that plagues our age. On one hand, it is necessary for poetry to be relevant to life and history, to be a point of resistance against the hypocrisies of our day and age. Undeniably, we’re all political entities, and definitely, it doesn’t make sense for art to assume ignorance of this. But I am uncomfortable about politics colonizing the literary sphere. While I am not advocating a separation of politics and art, I think it’s important that art, poetry doesn’t become the tool of propagandists. When you move a political struggle into art, to what extent are you undermining the struggle when you reduce the cause to an artistic aesthetic subject? Can the liberal arts educated poet really take on the voice of the working class miner? Is the exploitation of another voice an imposition of another kind of insidious power relationship? I'm not providing a critique of Rukeyser here, just thinking out loud about poetry, and the dangers of a naive reading of poetry.

It's too easy to be emotionally exploited by the lyrical voice. But poetry is not innocent, neither is it noble. Even if it sets out with the noble task of rewriting history. When you use a specific incident to illustrate a broader political theme, you invite people to say “oh, this reminds me of another incident, and etc, and etc.” Historicity becomes collapsed within the concerns of today, or poetic metaphor. Dehistoricization and deconstextualization is another imposition of silence. It is violence, a different form of violence from the violence it protests against. But violence, nonetheless. And a blind art is one that is unable see its own limitations, that mistakes violence for the honorable political struggle.