I’m currently reading Poetry Unbound’s 50 Poems to Open Your World, which I actually don’t love, but that’s a discussion for another day, maybe tomorrow as I’m going to push myself through it I think so I can be done. Hate reading, as I think of it, for the book count, which is a stupid reason to finish the book but the poems are great and interesting and there might be a poem in here I really love, so that’s something to look forward to.
Anyway, the book has a lot of poems about refugees and people who have faced hardship due to state-level violence and oppression. To be clear that isn’t why I hate it—I just dislike the poem analyses which is the main portion of the book. There’s one poem by Ilya Kaminsky that has me thinking, it’s the first poem in Kaminsky’s famous Deaf Republic. It starts with the lines ‘And when they bombed other people’s houses, we/protested/but not enough, we opposed them but not/enough.’
I was just at a protest this weekend. I glanced briefly online and heard several people say that the No Kings protests are performative, not transformative.
They’re certainly very peaceful, for better or worse. I wouldn’t be able to attend if it were violent, nor would I want to as I’m not a violent person. I connected there with several activist groups and spoke at length with someone representing a third party whose beliefs I espouse, but that I know realistically can’t win in the governor’s race. I’m a realist at heart. Connecting and getting resources was great, but it’s not enough.
There’s a one-day national strike coming up which I likely won’t be able to participate in because I’m an apprentice and I can’t jeopardize my entire program for this (sorry world.) But a one day strike just honestly isn’t enough to effect change.
I boycott bad companies and buy organic when I can afford it and participate in a CSA during the growing season and clean up litter when I hike, but it’s not enough.
I recently finished writing a poem (which I can’t post here because I just submitted it to a journal for potential publication (?!)) and it’s first three lines are:
‘It’s okay to let go of the world,/let it shrink to fit just our house and the valley—/to tuck the newspapers in the tinder box.’
This poem was born out of this feeling of weight, carrying all these heavy things: wars, famines, factory farming, the great pacific garbage patch, etc. etc. etc. The world is fucked up. And these problems are so big and complex that I have a hard time even conceptualizing the pain and suffering, let alone find bandwidth to think of solutions. I wrote the poem to myself, telling myself it’s okay to let all of that go. The poem goes on to focus on images of this smaller world, and then ends with the image of someone trying to carrying in all the grocery bags at once and the bags leaving welts on their wrist the message being: there is a cost to carrying these burdens.
I’m constantly living with this feeling of knowing that my actions are more or less useless. I think that’s an extremely pessimistic space to be in, and yes, I’m a realist, but also not a pessimist. My best has to be enough. Maybe not enough to change the world, but enough to bring joy into it. I think many people would reject this view of letting go of the world. I recognize that people are suffering, but I also can’t keep throwing pity parties for myself because I’m unable to do things that would effect real change like becoming a politician or overthrowing the government or inventing a plastic-destroying magic science goop to fix the ocean. But this is really the thing I think I’m good at—bringing joy. Through writing, through raising my daughter to be a good human (who knows, maybe she’ll be the one to change the world), to supporting the people around me and building my community through my work as an electrician (and pushing back on the racist/misogynist/whacky views of my coworkers).
I recognize this is a really privileged position. I’m not in any immediate danger because I’m not brown or trans or whatever the hate flavor of the week is. (Colored-hair queer person sometimes is the hate flavor, so I guess at some point they’ll come back for me.) But like Emerson wrote, we all have our genius, and I think if I can write something that touches someone’s’ heart, helps them relate to nature or human beings in a new way and have some compassion for others, or gives someone hope to keep fighting the good fight, that might be the greatest good that I can do.
I think Kaminsky does a fantastic job of shining a mirror on Americans, that they didn’t do ’enough’ to stop the evil. That is certainly a poet’s job.
And I think it’s also a poet’s job to foster love for country and people and land, and bring joy that makes all of this feel worth fighting for.