Poetry and Power
In my youth I bought a book entitled: Poets in the Republic of Power by Mirko Lauer, a Czech-Peruvian author. I loved the poems it included. There was work by Propercio, Ernesto Cardenal, Rodolfo Hinostroza, and anonymous Chinese authors — all of them writing against power, while putting poetry in a privileged place.
In his introduction, Mirko Lauer writes about the relationship between poetry and power; the place of the poet in the face of power. One of Propercio's poems was forever floating in me, and every time I interviewed a poet for "La maja desnuda," Propercio himself would come to ask: what is the relationship between poetry and power?
In a time such as ours, as the world witnesses the emergence of new Caesars, where dictators, owners of arms, owners of money, and those in power seem to rule the world, it’s good to hear and read what poets think in relation to that hegemony: where do their verses, their poems, and they themselves stand in relation to power?
What follows below are the first in a series of responses to my question from poets Shara McCallum, Julia Kasdorf, and the Syrian poet, Adonis.
Shara McCallum
What is the place of Poetry in the face of power?
This is a complex question. I’ll say that in the face of political repression, poetry can speak directly, or indirectly if needed — through metaphor — to truths that the state might not want to have heard. We find this in the stories of poets who were political dissidents and paid for their views, sometimes with their own lives. We see this even with lyric poets who are not suffering such extremity, but whose work still takes on power through the “I” as witness. When I say that poetry confronts power, what I really mean is it illumines abuses of power. Poets have used, and will continue to use, their voices to speak against injustice, felt personally and in the body politic.
What is the relationship between Poetry and power?
I’ll speak to one of the ways a poem wields great power. A poem can reshape how we think of the past. It cannot change what has happened, but it is a form of time travel that allows us to retrace the past to learn from its missteps, and even to present alternate accounts of events that have unfolded. In this way, the poet’s imagination as it pertains to history — public and personal alike — is an intervention. This is particularly so for poets who are drawn to examining events that have created fault lines that continue to be felt in the present. From the clearing of the present, poets are often singing a song of loss (and the past is always a site of loss). There is great power in this singing.
Julia Spicher Kasdorf
“Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable” chanted one of my early poetry teachers, Nick Lindsay (1927-2020), bardic son of performance poet Vachel Lindsay (1897-1931), who took his life by drinking turpentine, leaving behind a wife and two children with nothing but debt and The Great Depression. Nick, four years old then, can be recognized as the voice of a “carpenter poet” speaking of the concrete forms he poured for the construction of a hydrogen bomb plant near Savannah, Georgia, in Studs Terkel’s Working: People Talk about What they Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. For 92 years, Nick wrote and performed poems and plays and gathered oral histories on Edisto Island, South Carolina, while also building houses and 60- and 90-ton trawlers. He also taught sometimes at Goshen College in Indiana.
“Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.” American poets more commonly attribute the phrase to Lucille Clifton (1936-2010), whose lyric poems capture women’s and Black experience in fresh and direct ways that ordinary people cherish. Others attribute the phrase to the twentieth century ethicist and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), whose work at the intersection of religion, politics, and public policy would later influence Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama. Niebuhr also composed the “Serenity Prayer,” an emancipatory text for those in 12-step programs for addiction recovery. A Google search reveals that the phrase first appeared in a 1902 dialect parody, however, uttered by a fictional Irish bar-tender invented by the Chicago Evening Post’s muckraking journalist Finley Peter Dunne. It first referred to newspapers.
That makes sense to me. Poetry, the art of language, always borrows power from the other arts. Poets use the incantatory tools of music — repetition of sounds — along with the conjuring skills of painting and photography. But poetry’s ability to challenge power, to take up just causes in the world, comes from the tools we share with journalists. We listen, witness, and render fresh evidence. We investigate and seek the truth. We articulate unspoken experiences, and we amplify the muffled voices of others. Guided only by nerve sometimes, we transform the vulnerability of the victim into truthful beauty, weakness into strength. This work goes by many names, some of them easily dismissed by poetry’s power: poetry of witness, docupoetry, documentary poetry, confessional, personal narrative. And still we persist.
Adonis Ali Ahmad Said Esber
A poet is, by definition, an anti-authoritarian, and above all anti-institutional. Since power is an institution, the poet by necessity goes against the power. I am anti-regime (I oppose the regimes in the Arab world). And my fight against the regime is not only political: to demonstrate in the street, organize protests, scream slogans — that is politics. My aim is to criticize the foundation of the culture engendered under this regime. To substitute one regime for another does not alter anything: change must be achieved in the foundation, the institutions have to change, people must change, society. My personal problem as a poet is with the institutions. If change comes I will support it, but I will remain critical; poetry cannot take part in power, but must always go against it — otherwise, the poet ceases to be a poet.
A poet must keep poetry in an essential place: firstly because poetry will never be capable of being instrumentalized, as in the poetry related to the era of Stalin — that, never! For poetry is transgression, is always a voyage toward life. I am in full accordance with the notion of freedom; I think that one may always struggle within freedom. For example, let’s say you oppose me, and I am the authority: I can no longer struggle with you after I’ve already put you in jail, but I can fight you with freedom.
I am an anti-nationalist because nationalism has turned into an ideology that we must surpass. If we are to understand nationalism as that which belongs to the people, to a land, then very well. But if we interpret it as an ideology against the others, against our very own brethren, then count me out. We must do combat without violence. I am against violence. I believe in non-violence. And I believe one must battle without cruelty. I want to conquer with truth, with reason, not with bloodshed. And even though we may earn opponents and enemies, it is important to remain democratic, even if they are not. God in the Koran, for example, has the devil as an enemy, God dialogues with him, and the devil rejects the word of God — but even then, God let the devil freely go his way — thusly in keeping with the promise in the Koran. God, for me, is Love, Poetry, Brotherhood, and Peace.
— Translated by Arturo Desimone, from an interview of Adonis talking to Nidia Hernández in Spanish in Caracas
Nidia Hernández was born in Venezuela, and has been living in the US since 2018. She is a poet and translator of Portuguese poetry, an editor, broadcaster, and radio producer, and a poetry curator. Nidia directs the editorial project lamajadesnuda.com, which won the 2011 WSA prize for Cultural Heritage. She curates Poesiaudio (Arrowsmith Press) and is a contributor for Mercurius Magazine. She has presented works drawn from the 31 years of her radio program (also called La maja desnuda) which has more than 1,560 broadcasts. Currently, she is broadcasting the program through UPV Radio 102.5 FM in Valencia, Spain.