Tender shoots of enlightenment spring free. Step back and stoke the embers of feeling But that insistence overlooks the more subtle manner in which poetry sometimes works: There’s others though that need a space to think In “these days” of precarity and crisis, there are “many” in the poetic community insisting that poets must harness their muses to the work of liberation, make their social and political commitments clear in their poetry. The following poem, “Compulsory Conviction,” is far more pointed: Many these days demand a show of faith The poem ends by tying itself in a perfect knot of paradox, leaving the reader unsure whether the “jump-start poem” is being cherished or anathematized. Just long enough for a jump-poem to start it all “I wonder if jump-start poems are a cop-out / Or a necessary moment (brief moment) against cop out,” Toscano writes, and then finds himself wondering whether “jump-start poems” actually exist: And if they do exist, whether they wonder themselvesĪbout poems that wonder about not wonderingįending off the hounds of lassitude, indolence, and surrender
What’s fundamentally common between folks Not having to, you know, massage an affiliationīut instead, riffing on what’s elementally human Not having to take a publicly recognizable position I mean, poems, meant to get at existential being itselfįor a moment (brief moment) stripped of social causality 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. 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.
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