Poetry and Politics: Must Every Poet Take a Side?
A contest judge takes on the oldest argument in poetry: whether poets must be political, what a political poem owes its reader, and a five-question test to run before you publish one.
Last November I scored two poems about the same border. The first named three politicians, quoted a news anchor, and told me four separate times that I should be angry. The second described a grandmother sewing her house keys into the hem of her coat before the family walked out the door. I do not remember one line of the first poem. I could draw you the coat. That gap, between the poem that lectures and the poem that makes you carry the keys yourself, is where any honest conversation about poetry and politics has to start.
So, must poets be political? I have heard the question at festival panels, in workshop breaks, in emails from entrants who worry their quiet poems about their fathers are somehow frivolous. My short answer is no. My longer answer is that the question itself is broken, and fixing it will make you a better poet regardless of what you write about.
An Old Question, Badly Asked
The question assumes there are two bins: political poems over here, everything else over there. Real poems refuse the bins. A poem about a grandmother's coat is a border poem. A poem about school shoes is an economics poem. A love poem written in a language the state once tried to erase is political down to its grammar. Percy Shelley called poets "the unacknowledged legislators of the world" back in 1821, and he did not mean poets who write about parliaments. He meant that every genuine poem adjusts, slightly, what its readers believe a human life is worth. That adjustment is the political act. The subject matter is almost beside the point.
When someone demands that poets "be political," they usually mean something narrower: take my side, loudly, in this week's argument. That demand has produced some necessary poems. It has produced far more bad ones.
Poetry and Politics Were Never Actually Separate
People talk as if poetry and politics got introduced at a conference in the 1960s. Read backwards and the two are tangled from the start. The Hebrew prophets wrote verse. The English ballad tradition is full of enclosure, hanging judges, and press gangs. Wilfred Owen, dead a week before the Armistice in 1918, wrote in the preface to his poems: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." Notice what he did there. Not the policy. The pity. Owen is savage about generals and cheerful civilians, but his poems survive because they stay locked on the specific dying body in front of him. If you want to see how the greats handled this, spend an evening with Wilfred Owen or with the long tradition of war poems, and watch how rarely the best of them mention a single politician by name.
The lesson I take from that history: political conviction gets a poem started. It has never once, in anything I have judged, been what made a poem good.
What a Political Poem Owes the Reader
Here is my strong opinion, and I will defend it: a political poem owes the reader everything a love poem owes the reader, plus one thing more. It owes honesty about complexity. A love poem can get away with worship. A political poem that worships its own position curdles into propaganda, even when the position is correct.
The political poems that have beaten hundreds of competitors on my scoresheets share three traits. They stake everything on the particular: one coat, one checkpoint, one pair of hands. They allow at least one moment of doubt, cost, or complicity, because the speaker who is purely innocent is a speaker I do not believe. And they trust the reader to arrive at the anger on her own. The moment a poem starts underlining its own moral, I feel managed, and a managed reader is a lost reader.
A poem is not a vote. A poem is the reason a vote means anything.
That is the standard. Not "did you take the right side" but "did you make a stranger feel what is at stake so precisely that no side-taking was necessary."
The Right to Write About the Kettle
Now the other flank, because it needs defending too. Some of the finest poems I have scored are about a kettle, a marriage, a heron, a hospital corridor. Nobody should feel that these poems require an apology. Attention is not a luxury. In a culture that profits from your distraction, writing four true lines about your dying mother's hands is a small act of resistance all by itself.
There is also a practical craft argument. Poets who force themselves toward headlines they have not lived tend to write from the same three photographs everyone saw online. The results are secondhand, and judges can smell secondhand from the first stanza. Your kettle, though, is yours. Nobody else on earth has your kettle. Specificity is credibility, and credibility is the currency every poem spends. If your honest material this year is grief or tenderness or boredom, write that, and write it all the way down.
- Write the subject you have standing to write, not the one trending this week.
- If a public event genuinely entered your kitchen, write the kitchen, not the event.
- Never apologize inside a poem for the poem's own subject. It reads as flinching.
- Remember that tenderness, closely observed, argues for a world worth governing well.
A Worked Example: From Slogan to Poem
Let me show you the difference instead of asserting it. Here is a stanza of the kind I read every single month, written by me as a fair composite:
They close the borders while children cry, / the powerful feast while the hungry die, / we must stand up, we must unite, / injustice anywhere is never right.
Every word is sincere. Every word is dead. It is all conclusion and no evidence, and the rhyme marches the reader along like a security guard. Now the same conviction, rebuilt from one image:
At the checkpoint her passport opens / like a mouth with nothing left to say. / The guard is nineteen. He was somebody's / small boy once, in a kitchen, being fed.
Nothing here tells you what to think. But the passport as a silenced mouth does the arguing, and the guard's remembered childhood refuses to let anyone stay a cartoon, which makes the injustice worse, not softer. That is imagery doing the work slogans cannot do. The first version informs. The second version implicates. Only one of those changes a reader.
Five Questions Before You Publish a Political Poem
When a poem with public subject matter lands on my desk, I can usually tell within eight lines whether the poet interrogated it first. Here is the checklist I wish every entrant ran, the same one I run on my own drafts:
- Could my opponent read this without feeling caricatured? Not agreed with. Caricature is the tell of a poem written only for applause.
- Is there one image a photographer could not have captured? If everything in your poem was already on the news, the poem has no reason to exist.
- Where am I in this? Name your distance, your comfort, your complicity. The speaker with clean hands convinces no one.
- Does the poem survive with its last two lines deleted? Most political drafts end by explaining themselves. Cut the explanation and see if the images already said it.
- Will this still be readable in ten years? Swap the names for their equivalents from thirty years ago. If the poem collapses, it was commentary, not poetry.
I have watched this checklist rescue poems. A woman in one of our workshop threads cut two sloganeering stanzas from a poem about her town's shuttered mine, ran the fifth question, kept only the image of her father washing coal dust from his ears at the kitchen sink, and the revision scored higher on emotion and language than anything she had entered before. Since Writory shows every entrant a five-criteria breakdown of exactly where a poem gained and lost points, she could see the jump in numbers, not just feel it. If you want that mirror held up to your own work, send us the poem you are proudest of this month and read your scores when they arrive.
The Only Side a Poem Must Take
So, must poets be political? You must not be anything except awake. But I will go one step further, because a shrug is not a position. Every poem worth keeping takes exactly one side: the side of the particular human against the abstraction. Against the statistic, the slogan, the category, the crowd. Sometimes that fight happens at a border. Sometimes it happens at a kettle. The battlefield is optional. The allegiance is not.
Write the coat with the keys sewn into it. Write the guard who was once fed in a kitchen. Write your father's ears at the sink. If your poem makes one stranger unable to round a human being up to the nearest category, you have done the political work of poetry, whether or not anyone can tell which way you vote. The poets we still read did not take sides in arguments. They made the arguments feel like people. That job is open. It has always been open. Apply.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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