![]() In “Jump-Start Poems,” Toscano wonders whether poems that take no explicit political stance, that attempt to deal with the “deep” questions of existence, are even “worth it”: Still, in the insterstices of this ego-driven industry, there’s the possibility of imagining new modes of living: Old Universalisms pen us in Three: perchance it payeth the rent-gollyįive: it clipeth the fugitive’s new wings Two: it stauncheth today’s systemic wounds One: it bestoweth wings to wingless works There’s exactly five things a prize can do: “Homo Americanus” is a bitterly hilarious send-up of the spectacle of literature conferences and the entire academic creative writing industry: But here we are, herding piss-poor students The page is a space where poets can wryly highlight the injustices that affect human lives, where they can urge us to reflection and action but those linguistic interventions are always secondary to the concrete political labor of collecting data, of organizing, of trying to bend our present dystopia in more humane directions.Īt times, the pieces of The Charm & the Dread are less political poems than poems about the possibility of political poetry. If that doesn’t change, then what is all this?Īren’t shaped differently, aren’t lived differently As he writes in “Insurrectionary,” The day to day existence of people Perhaps it’s his day job of liberatory labor that allows Toscano to take such a questioning stance toward political poetry as a genre. His latest searingly political book, The Charm & the Dread, combines nuts-and-bolts geopolitical analysis, calls to arms, ironic reflections on the place of political discourse (both poetic and otherwise) in North America, quiet and loud meditations on the COVID-19 experience, and a good deal of sheer fun. ![]() Rodrigo Toscano, one of our keenest and funniest Leftist poets, doesn’t need to prove his activist credentials: as a project director at the Labor Institute, he’s been working in the trenches of union organizing, occupational safety and health, and environmental issues for more than two decades. Auden’s flat assertion that “poetry makes nothing happen,” contemporary politically committed poets have made a cottage industry of agonizing over the question of whether their Leftist bona fides, as manifested in their poetry, actually make any difference. Somewhere between the extremes of Shelley’s poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of mankind” and W. But whether one can take meaningful social or political action through poetry is another question. Poets, workers in language alert to the shifts and guiles of public rhetoric (“the antennae of the race,” Pound called them), are often acutely aware of the inequities and horrors around them, and feel acutely the necessity for action. Unlike the dog in the meme (“ This is fine”), many of us long to do something as our world burns down around us but mostly we watch. Perhaps the best measure of "the poet" is how much and how well his work makes things happen, in that subtle and cumulative way that Meredith talks about - how it helps us discover the right words on the tongue for an "order revealed by the closest looking" - and Adrian Mitchell always lived up to that standard.The past two COVID years, characterized by limited interactions and confinement to our homes, have only underscored the extent to which ours has become a culture of spectatorship. Now, looking back, I am a little surprised by what Adrian Mitchell's work, and his example, meant to me. As one teacher put it, when I walked into the staff room clutching my folder of workshop ideas: "You're not the poet!" And, of course, I wasn't. By some mishap, we had been booked on the same day, with the same classes, and I remember the confusion that ensued when I arrived, far too early and not quite sure what I was getting myself into. ![]() When I was starting out, a rookie poet with my head, as the French saying goes, "full of everything and nothing", I met Adrian Mitchell at a school in Surrey. ![]() ![]() Poetry makes things happen, in other words, by equipping us with right speech, and so preparing us for right action - and, as such, it is an essentially moral discipline. In "Talking Back (To WH Auden)", William Meredith counters with the suggestion that Auden famously declared that "poetry makes nothing happen" - by which, I think, he meant that we cannot expect from a poem some simple process of cause-and-effect. ![]()
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