ARTWORK: Eliza Williams
Tweeting Tyrants vs. Instagram Poets: Will Poetry be a 21st Century Vehicle for Change? By Juliette Brown You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise. - Maya Angelou
However, as WH Auden implies in his poem ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’, traditional political speeches and rhetoric are also forms of ‘poetry’, which can be used to both manipulate and oppress:
History is an anthology of great poems. Consider Walt Whitman’s spirited espousals of democracy or Maya Angelou and Sylvia Plath’s rumbling, fiery words that exploded and expanded the feminist space. Poetry is inherently political. The form lends itself to the use of visceral imagery. These can be mimetic of the memories of trauma and allow poets to convey the shared struggles of communities; to include and implicate. Take the punchy, fragmented and whirlwind imagery in Aracelis Girmay’s poem, ‘You Are Who I Love’:
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
You are who I love, behind the library desk, leaving who might kill you, crying with the love songs, polishing your shoes, lighting the candles, getting through the first day despite the whisperers sniping fail fail fail Exploring racial injustice, Girmay seeks to ‘promote compassion’ with her poems. Poetic metre and rhythm also build passion and momentum. Poems easily become rallying calls, protest chants and war cries. Furthermore, spoken-word poetry allows individuals and groups to reclaim agency within the public sphere (‘The only power I recognize is the God breath in me, and all of its femininity’ - Ikysha jones, York BLM movement).
Remind you of anyone? (Epitaph on Trump?) This notion also recalls the Chinese Government’s imagery-laden rhetoric, arguably employed to obfuscate policy and control Chinese and Hong Kong Nationals. The National People’s Congress Standing Committee’s reports on Hong Kong have likened full democracy to ‘too much chemotherapy’ that would ‘kill the patient’, in the hopes of dissuading calls for democratic reform. Poetic imagery can stagnate and obscure just as much as it can galvanise and elicit empathy. So, how will this poetic duality manifest in the 2020s? Will poetry stoke or quell political movements? The traditional narrative of the impoverished poet going up against the Man™ in the streets, in the newspapers and in their leather-bound notebooks is no longer as pertinent as it once was.
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