As someone who has written both poetry and political statements, I have to observe that much political discourse is dead for a reason. People like to have their preconceptions played to, and cliches are the easiest and most effective way to do that. Good poetry is always trying to get us to look at the world from new perspectives, and most people hate anything truly novel. As a rule, politicians hate taking risks, especially with their language. Barack Obama could employ inspiring language when he had to, but much of the time even his discourse was dry as toast. As for poetry, however, this article neglects to mention the importance of poetry to the mindfulness movement, where many thousands of people are listening to poets like Mary Oliver, Derek Walcott, Naomi Shihab Nye, Rumi, and many others, right now. The reason some people think they hate poetry is because they've never encountered poetry that spoke to them. I think that's changing, and consequently poetry is alive and doing better than ever.
38
"In recent months, Senator Warren has become an even more effective storyteller."
This is an important point. The national campaign has liberated Warren from being a Harvard Law School professor and allowed her reclaim her Oklahoma childhood heritage, which is her more true and authentic identity. As a Massachusetts senate candidate, she felt obligated to stay in her liberal academic box. Now she is free from that artificial constraint and a more effective campaigner as a result.
35
Interesting article. Warren's choice of a poet shows a breadth to her character, as well as an appropriate commitment to being able to say things in a clear, creative way. Of course, the naysayers will claim that poetry is elitist, arcane, misleading, propagandistic, and all sorts of other nasty (and sometimes self-contradictory) things. But they are wrong. Poetry, when done well, is compelling, gets the image across, and invites the reader/listener to find a way to internalize the message in ways that are personally meaningful.
40
As soon as I read this headline I immediately thought of a quotation I believe is correctly attributed to Mario Cuomo: "We campaign in poetry and govern in prose." Poetry in campaigns stirs us, raises our hopes, directs us to the beautiful, makes us aspire to the possible. Spelling out plans does not help us but ties us down in petty squabbles. The mechanics of legislation can be arduous and boring; most of us have no patience for it. We need poetry in our campaigns, not the minutiae of future legislation. We need candidates who speak to what is deep down the best in America and what it can still aspire to become for all.
51
@Eamon
When we are hungry, we need bread, not roses. (poetry) But when we are hungry, neither should we swallow stones and pretend it is bread.
10
Elizabethan Poetry!
93
Poetry has been well describedd as "language at full stretch", using all its resources in the most efficient ways. Politics needs this: words with meaning, words that count.
I have written more books than you can shake a stick at but poetry is my chosen vehicle today. It forces me to find transcendent terms that render petty conflict ... well petty.
More power to any politician who values the craft and promotes those who are recognized as up and coming.
I like politicians who collects all the facts before they fudge them, unlike Trump who fudges them as they come.
The author shows no awareness of the great Urdu ghazal tradition that has couched revolutionary messages in the language of love in which the pined for beloved is none other than Revolution, the day when it comes, according to the Lenin Award winner Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz, crowns will come crashing down, and the seats of power knocked from under the oppressors.
Ask any Urdu poetry lover, he or she would love to expound on the political uses of poetry.
If Ms. Quart mentioned Woodie Guthrie, I missed it.
1
I think she needs an accountant on her team.
1
Well, poetry and politics do not mix, but they do mingle.
Have you noticed that only Democrats invite poets to read at their inaugurals, never Republicans?
1
She may have a poet on her team, but she still reminds me of the stern, finger wagging, preachy mother superior we kids were all terrified of in grade school.
2
A poet? Another reason I won't vote for her. RFK was poetic; so was Obama; so was Clinton; so was Reagan; so was Lincoln. Warren is a technocrat and no poetry pantomime will make her appear anything other than more tin-eared than she is.
1
I believe I will like her poetry....
I hear Ms. Felix is working on how to pay for Medicare For All.
“Paid for by the/ people but not your people/ I mean/ I’m saying/ rich people /you wouldn’t understand this,”
1
Good idea, wrong poet.
How about Springsteen, Dylan, Stevens, Williams, or Gwendolyn Brooks?
The poetry, not the person.
Elizabeth is still striking out with black voters.
1
"The social revolution [...] cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. [...] There the phrase went beyond the content – here the content goes beyond the phrase. "
Karl Marx
Killer Mike and Cardi B are active supporters of Bernie Sanders, so naturally Warren has to "have a plan" for Poetry.
Smart move. Remember when President Gore got his colors done during his campaign?
Compelling oratory is nice but after Trump I’d settle on speaking complete sentences.
1
Senator Warren nees Jorge Luis Borges, who despite being born in Buenos Aires, was a visiting professor of English (yes, you read correctly, not Spanish) literature at Harvard for 3 years. He said, in a poem titled From An Apocryphal Gospel:
Thou shalt not magnify the worship of truth: for at the day's end there is no man who hath not lied many times with good reason.
Senator Warren's problem is that Borges has been dead for nearly 50 years.
and amid the rancid cheers
one lone poetic voice:
no more years.
Bad Angel
Tell me again how you romanced despair
And how this little angel took your side -
As you left plainer comfort standing there
Her tears no match for flashy foolish pride?
And how you broke an ordinary heart
To flirt with glamour, novelty and fame
But found deceit had ripped your life apart
And left you with a temptress lost to shame.
And how this spirit turned from friend to fiend
With curt demands and endless expectation
Until she broke down what you had dreamed
And left you lost in desolation -
And then grew mute towards the bitter end
Bringing life to quiet desperation.
1
Who knew that Professor Elizabeth Warren was after a literary award?
National Book Award? Pulitzer Prize?
Warren's chirping Chihuahua tireless trifling' I have a plan' style delusionally presumes that American voters crave multiple detailed policy principled proposals before voting.
1
Trump v poet. Trump wins.
1
It's more or less laureate verse, isn't it? Poems about the same things that dominate the news and TV talk. I note that Hopkins didn't spend his time writing poems on the equivalent topics in the 1880s, while Tennyson was obligated to read the newspapers and occasionally opine in poems we no longer read. The writer knows his poetic tradition, but why he thinks this isn't banal is beyond me:
“I belong to the/ people but not your people/ I mean/ I’m saying/ my people /you wouldn’t understand this,”
3
SIGNED, SEALED & DELIVERED
#45
By, Rick Tornello
_____________________________
Keep your souls, I want them not.
Greater value is in my bet
Giving you to your desires
Through and through by far
To the millions who by the cause of your rise
To the levels of hate and deceit
Pent up over the years from those I have yet to make my own.
But through you,
An opportunities’ wide window open
But through you,
Like lambs to slaughter
Sheep to be led shorn of all and bled.
Oh such a gift to me?
Keep your souls they mean nothing to me.
The interest payment will be more,
More than you could ever realize
In gold or suffering, a family thing
if you will it to me.
Keep your souls.
The coil’s trap, a whole nation
Whose banner they proudly claim
Under to fall to you and your baseless call
Keep your souls
The interest is worth it all
The greed to which most will fall
Trashing ignoring the papers which established it all
So unique.
The Janus faced ones, a congress of fools
declaring one but to the opposite, their conduct
visible, not even hidden and blind eyed all
to greed and all power hungry drunk.
When a raft is punted to the other shore
And it’s task completed, is it not abandoned?
Keep your souls.
Finis
2
A stimulating review in which you briefly note various types and
functions of poetic creation and expression.
An additional one to mention is
that of raising much needed
“legitimate questions.”
About that which we need to
better know. And understand.
But do not. Have not.
Because the relevant,
necessary question, and
it’s inherent quest to explore,
has not been asked.
Not been considered.
In a world of “illegitimate questions,” garbed as answers,
but which, at best, are
descriptions of information,
valid, or not,
which do not lead to needed understandings.
Pablo Neruda’s “Book of Questions”
is one such masterful example.
1
On being asked for a War Poem
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
I think it better that in times like these
A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth
We have no gift to set a statesman right;
He has had enough of meddling who can please
A young girl in the indolence of her youth,
Or an old man upon a winter’s night.
2
Great news and great article. But FYI: "professorial" and "lyrical" are not antonyms. How about we check the implicit anti-intellectualism and recognize that Warren's "professorial" style is, in fact, the product of her thoughtful, empathetic, and engaging character?
7
"Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there."
--William Carlos Williams
5
“Professorial” is not a pejorative term, NYT
4
A "my personal issues only" poet is not a good poet. You are supposed to write about what you know, but what you know is supposed to exceed the limits of your identity. It's supposed to speak to the universal through the lens of of your experience. Otherwise, it becomes advocacy, and even brilliant, beautiful advocacy is still just advocacy. Great advocacy deserves awards too, but not poetry awards.
Yeats, an Irish poet, wrote some poems like "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death" that speak eloquently to his Irish identity, but in terms so universal and beautiful that every one of us immediately recognizes ourselves in them, despite not being, say, born at Sandymount in County Dublin, Ireland in 1865. We would all do well to read it.
Oh, wait, I forgot, Yeats was white and male. Nothing to read here, to paraphrase an English bobbie.
Bitter? Just a little. Art is neither less nor more important than social justice, but it is different, and it is disagreeable to see it subordinated in so coarse a manner.
18
@NLG
I love William Butler Yeats. Great poetry speaks to every race and gender. Shakespeare's plays are performed regularly in Africa; Sappho is still quoted after 26 centuries, though most of her poems were deliberately destroyed by men.
We need poetry in a leader; soul, intelligence, compassion, humility, knowledge of history. Wait - wasn't that Obama?
No matter who leads, we are always on the edge of barbarism and it doesn't take much to tip over. In the US generations won't fund education, just praise the flag and preach Creation. But Trumpty will have a great fall from his wall, and that will be poetic, or at least poetic justice.
6
@NLG
Do you mean Yeats?
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti at 100 and a half, has been writing political poesy for more than 80 years mebbe? Check out "Poetry as Insurgent Art" (2007)
Perhaps she can compose a rhyming couplet explaining precisely how Warren plans on paying for her health care plan.
2
Do you mean “vault over” not “vaunt over”? Otherwise, I totally agree!
I miss Larry Eisenberg. He would have had a nice limerick comment for this
What you gain with poetry, you lose with feminist lingo. Fake news=mansplaining. Alt-right=misogynist. Tiresome labels overused and abused that communicate your biases and reveal your mindless allegiances.
2
So agree. Poetry goes straight to my soul. Quickly, powerfully. Our collective American soul listens...
2
I think the senator's poet is another reason that she is unlikely to be president next year.
4
Will poetry make Ms Warren more accessible to more Americans or fewer? Poetry might inspire her more faithful and literate followers while confounding and alienating those who are looking for an explanation of her policies in clear and concise terms. We are still waiting for a detailed explanation of how her Medicare For All plan will be paid for, along with its implementation schedule. Furthermore, it is unclear how the elimination of hundreds of thousands of direct and indirect health insurance industry workers' jobs will be managed and how receptive health care workers will be to reduced incomes under much lower Medicare mandated fees for service. The push back and propaganda "Harry and Louise"campaign waged by the health insurance industry and Republicans that struck down HilllaryCare in the 90's was brutal and highly effective. Sadly, Ms Warren waxing poetic will not save her campaign or resonate with a sufficient number of voters.
2
@Jeff You say "We are still waiting for a detailed explanation of how her Medicare For ". I'm not. The president presents concepts, the experts have to figure out the details. Ms Warren has just issued a challenge for the Congress to do its job.
5
To understand the true election prospects of Elizabeth Warren and her close ideological rival, Bernie Sanders, consider Bernie's great admiration for the historic socialist Eugene Debbs. Debbs won all of 6 PER CENT of the presidential vote when he ran in 1906. Liz and Bernie are really running as gadflies, they are modern day Debbs. Their prospects of actually winning the White House are about the same as Eugene Debbs prospects of winning election in 1906. This helps to explain why Biden, the main alternative to Liz and Bernie, is most recently polling way ahead of both Liz and Bernie in the Democratic race.
1
@David I find the two much more similar to our only president elected four times, FDR. Scaremongering about "socialism" that is in fact basic programs found in every other industrialized nation does no good.
7
@Eli Yes, Debs was ahead of his time, it took a severe depression to wake us up.
1
@David
Yes, Liz 'n Bern are splitting the progressive vote.
Take away either one and Biden is the one losing isn't he.
As for being gadflies, that would be your opinion. However I'd take a person fighting for HC for all, a livable wage and taxing the wealthy in the current gilded age. As opposed to a candidate known as Status Quo Joe. Who promises his wealthy Wall Street donors that NOTHING WILL CHANGE~! Who wants to continue a broken, corrupt Insur. Scam System, and who is part of the establishment that got us into this mess to begin with.
1
And for a fictional poet of a different sort see Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh protagonist of mystery novels by P.D. James, later turned into a British TV series.
Alas, his police colleagues were not enamored with the connection between poetry and police work.
Perhaps the poetry of political rhetoric will be more successful, but I doubt it.
1
Wonderful, poignant column. Refer readers, also, to Judy Grahn's classic, "THE WORK OF A COMMON WOMAN.'
3
And the commenting community of The New York Times was fortunate to have Larry Eisenberg on the team.
Larry's verse could be wickedly incisive or charmingly whimsical. Somehow he usually got in with the first comment on the list, so it was there for all to enjoy who were connoisseurs of the real stuff. He didn't take himself too seriously (a limitation that lost him the connoisseurs of that kind of stuff). And despite the dazzling speed with which he must have composed those early-bird comments, he handled the mechanics of foot and meter decidedly better than the poet in the limerick:
"There was a young man of Spokane
Whose poems never did scan.
When told this was so,
He said, 'Yes, I know,
But I always try to get as much in the last line as I possibly can."
Good night, Dr. Eisenberg, wherever you are.
14
You just gave me another reason to look at Elizabeth Warren for President. One of the first petty things my ex-governor Scott Walker did was remove state funding for our poet laureate-a tiny amount of money. It just proved to me again these extreme right wingers have no soul. Now more than ever we need all the humanities to help us find our lost courage, hearts, and brains.
25
Poetry can speak to the heart. Kennedy, Clinton and Obama were the only presidents to have poetry read at their inaugurations. Each poem acknowledges our past and inspires us to look forward to the greatness we can achieve together.
2013: Richard Blanco, "One Today"
2009: Elizabeth Alexander, "Praise Song for the Day"
1997: Miller Williams, "Of History and Hope"
1993: Maya Angelou, "On the Pulse of Morning"
1961: Robert Frost, "The Gift Outright"
Reading them, (I wish I could quote them all here), I only see how far we have fallen. Vote in 2020, make poetry great again.
28
@Luke And remember: poetry is a form of philosophy.
6
Just get poets involved.
34 years of marriage to a poet with extensive publications, and being around other poets, has convinced me that they are the sharpest, wittiest people in the planet.
Poets use language the way trapeze artists use a trapeze. They fly above us non-poets, twist and leap and soar. They have great skill but also confidence. Poets play with language the way those on the flying trapeze play with gravity.
Bring on the poets!
25
@Talbot
'Poets play with language.....'
Beautifully said!
1
Good for Warren! Democrats have always tended to talk about policy during campaigns, and have frequently lost to Republicans who had no policies but used language to appeal to people's feelings. I suggest that Warren should also put George Lakoff on her team. He's a genius where political language is concerned.
16
I think this author confuses poetry with rhetoric. Politicians use words rhetorically, as a tool, to persuade people. Poets put themselves at the disposal of words, which they realize have a life of their own. A poem is a flutter of sparrows the poet has managed, with a little stillness and patience, to get to alight in the palm of his hand.
19
@Kryztoffer , yes!
1
Ted Sorensen. JFK. One requires the other.
One might say the same about the best moments of Reagan and Peggy Noonan.
I kept a copy of Reagan's great speech on the occasion of the Challenger disaster, and rewatched it many times, just as I've called up some of Kennedy's great moments on YouTube, just for the pleasure and inspiration. I'm not Reagan fan, but he was President, and he rose to it magnificently.
So Warren has a poet. So Warren wants to give us words with art behind them. Thank God.
34
@Mark Thomason
To paraphrase -I knew JFK. JFK was a friend of mine. And you Senator Warren, are no John Kennedy. Meaning appended poetry will not make Senator Warren appear any more believably lyrical. She's a dry law school professor then, and now. The other type is Obama, another law school professor. See the difference?
Ah,yes, the poetry vote. I wish it were otherwise, but that has to be less than .01 percent of US voters. Rap and Hollywood and streamed entertainment dominate, so if Warren can lasso that crowd, she'll win.
Robert Frost and Maya Angelou could come out of their graves to support Warren, and it wouldn't move the election needle a jot.
When someone like Denzel or LeBron or Lady Gaga endorses Warren, that will be worth a story.
5
As a poet, I'm kind of torn about poetry, or any of the arts, being used as yet another outlet for political expression (and I have written and had published a few "political" poems).
Perhaps it has to do with what the author here alludes to--that it must be done very well. There are some astonishingly good poets out there (many, perhaps the majority, of them African-American, I've noticed) who write truly and passionately and viscerally about (usually painful) personal experience, using language in a way that is magical and impressionistic.
But a few years ago I started to get the sense that political poems had become almost obligatory in that little (and highly competitive) world. It almost became a game of emotional one-upmanship. And when a poem (or anything else) becomes so self-consciously political, it runs the risk of becoming merely another anthem.
For me, the most effective and affecting poems are like koans or parables--perhaps on one level maddeningly elusive and difficult to "understand." But this is where our minds can be freed from the hamster-wheel of conventional thought, from "ideas," to a level where the reader MAY suddenly be able to grasp things in a new way (something like enlightenment, I guess). It takes a highly skilled, intuitive, and unconventional artist to create such work, and a devoted reader (of which there really are few) to allow his or her mind to be taken where it will on its own--not merely led by a poet trying to make a "point."
14
@NGB
Yes, yes, yes. What s/he said.
2
One thing is for sure, the Democrats have a history of letting the Republicans choose the American political language.
The first time I noticed it was decades ago when GOP operatives deftly relabeled 'succession duties' (implication: they were a duty) to 'the death tax' (implication: "Can you believe they even want to tax death?")
They kept it up by redefining 'patriotism', 'real America' and countless other phrases.
We're conditioned to think, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." The thing is, words are really all we have, to conduct politics.
If Ms. Felix can help the Democrats to make better use of language (and also, while she's at it, convince Ms. Warren to let fly with her sense of humor) I'm all for it. It's certainly time to rewrite the story we're in.
28
It’s going to take more then poetry to convince the American electorate that Warren should lead the country.
It’s going to take about 3 Trillion, with a “T”, per year to pay for Medicare for All.
She’s staked her campaign on that.
Good luck at suggesting we double our annual spend and everything will be just fine.
6
@NYCSurgical -- Really? What they will we do with the other trillions we save?
You can't talk about the costs, without mentioning all the savings. Over the time this "costs" 3 trillion, we could be saving another 5 or 10 trillion.
Health care should cost the same here as it does in Canada or Europe. It costs 50% more, and covers 25% fewer, and those it does cover get hit with huge co-pays.
We are being ripped off. It is gigantic. Monstrous. It is more than the entire defense budget in just the rip off alone.
17% of GDP for health care for only some and those with co-pays, when it should be under 12% for everyone and no co-pays, and the entire defense budget is just 4%.
End that, and what do we do with more than an extra defense budget every year? Extra. Left over AFTER all the "extra cost" that Warren doesn't explain how to pay.
13
@Mark Thomason Thank you so much for stating so clearly what NYT even evaded clarifying when the wrote about Bernie's Medicare for all plan. Yes it saves money and has a better outcome and covers everything but nose jobs.
3
"— and I think we should get ready for more of it, because it’s coming and we need it, desperately. "
I've said to all who will listen, politics is the art of an effective story. Hollywood fails us as it must fail in telling the effective story because of its misplaced priorities. Sad because we can sense the potential and the reach, undeniable. So then poetry.
5
Maybe Ms. Felix will write a poem about how doing away with all private insurance and decriminalizing illegal immigration is not a way to win over the populace. Elizabeth needs to re-center her platform. If she did not have these two issues sticking out like sore thumbs she would be hands down the candidate.
8
@Hortencia -- Write a poem?
Cute way to belittle her.
How about help write a really great speech, that moves people to see the inhumanity of the way things are now?
Here is our chance to go from gutter snake trump talk to lyrical poetry. I'll take poetry hands down.
59
Individuals who excel in their field are rarely unidimensional. The best scientists have diverse interests and talents. Medical schools long ago disbanded the practice of selecting students from only the STEM fields. The selection committees learned that the music major, the poet, the artist often makes a superb doctor. Diverse knowledge expands the mind and enhances creativity. The poets will be a great asset in economics.
17
Ok. So Warren has attracted the free stuff crowd, the policy wonks and now the beatnik generation. Does she have a plan to pull any group that doesn’t view every issue as a problem for the government to solve?
8
@From Where I Sit -- Whereas Trump attracted what?
And of course Tulsi finally tells us the truth, that Hillary's attraction was as "the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party.” Is that what attracted this commenter?
I'll take someone who cares about American voters, not the corruption of Trump, nor the warmongering, corruption, and rot of Hillary either.
1
@From Where I Sit
Like the "free stuff" "Ambassador" Sondland got, what Fred Trump and his children got, what McConnell's reelection campaign got, what billionaires got? That free stuff crowd?
2
Freedom through government is fundamentally what Democrats are about. We don't consider it a flaw or something to be abandoned.
Art communicates. Poetry, when it works, communicates the abstract, the paradox of emotions, the yearnings of the electorate with mere words.
Within the rhetorical triangle of argument, pathos--appeal to emotions is most important when trying to sway or convince.
11
I support Elizabeth Warren almost as much as I support Bernie. But the idea of poetry right now, like the idea of spirituality, leaves me cold. We’re in the midst of a climate crisis and we have people in power who live in an alternative universe. We need people to rise up and stop the madness. We don’t have time for emoting through poetic expression. It reminds me of Nero fiddling while Rome burns. On so many related issues, we need action. We need a Green New Deal.
8
@LoveNOtWar
Poetry is action. It is making. And with some effort and skill it has the potential to awaken. Please don't fall into the trap of thinking it frivolous or beside the point. A grasp of the complexity of humanity and the poet's distillation is certainly meaningful and I'd suggest essential especially when so much in daily discourse fails to satisfy or inspire anyone. Hope you will find some that warms you and brings you to "rise up and help stop the madness."
16
@LoveNOtWar -- Poetry is the power of words to move people. We need that.
9
@B
I realize that the arts can move people to act. Im a retired teacher of the arts. But using poetry to awaken audiences is a slow process and we don’t have that kind of time. People are dying now. Thank goodness Elizabeth insists we stop selling arms to the Saudis who are creating the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. We need actions to stop the madness now. Poetry not so much.
4
What do you know. I liked Warren but was on the fence about her for the usual pragmatic reasons. Then I read this article and I'm all in.
All it took was a poet.
39
Hallelujah for poetry and the poets who make it.
While many poets have risked their lives to address negative social situations, recent politics and social media together have egregiously damaged our language.
Deplorable for anyone who loves language in its more classic form. Even common dialect has been civilized and legitimate when used with integrity and intelligent purpose.
The gutter of hatred and abuse produces only more of the same, merely escalating conflict.
The media is not excused from aiding and abetting this discouraging progression.
Hooray for poetry!
11
As a form, it is still up against what the poet and novelist Ben Lerner has called “the hatred of poetry.” “Many more people agree they hate poetry than can agree what poetry is."
You'd think the intensely intellectual Lerner could figure this out, given his mother is a therapist at the Menninger Clinic.
People don't hate poetry, per se. They hate aesthetics and most art forms in general. They have been conditioned by an industrialized society run on business to be averse to anything that is not conducive to productivity, efficiency, sales, and the dominance of Apollonian thinking.
Poetry is not utilitarian. It is Romantic and Dionysian. It does not fit today's business-driven sensibilities. But poetry can get to the truth by appealing to humanity directly, and avoiding all the commercial structures in the collective superego.
At the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, urban social problems were rampant. But they were balanced by the Romantic poets. People who never read poetry ran to the bookstores to purchase a new volume by Lord Byron. There was certainly no hatred of poetry back then in much cruder times.
Business and industry now have such hegemony that people have been brainwashed to have no truck with what Immanuel Kant called the transcendental aesthetic. But that is precisely what poetry is getting to.
16
@Wordsworth from Wadsworth
But you've forgotten the poets who stab at the heart of injustice. Some of their dirks are made of beauty.
N. Scott Momaday. Lucille Clifton. Ai. Tony Hoagland's essay 20 Poems That Could Save America. Toni Morrison. Langston Hughes. And so many others.
You've also forgotten MLK's and JFK's use of soaring diction, like the not-because-it-is-easy-but-because-it-is-hard. And Robert Kennedy's direct application of Aeschylus to prevent folks in Indianapolis from rioting after MLK's assassination.
I'm not sure her poems will gather many votes but her thought process might. Poets think differently than most of us. If I wanted to express an idea I would go first to a poet, not for the thought but for the words to use to express it. No one struggles more with words than the poet. No one can paint an image with words like a poet. Just one more reason to admire E.W..
13
I find having a poet on a political team to be quite charming. I love it!
Square state residents? Probably not so much.
It's more support for the growing consensus that, as a candidate for the general election, Warren has absolutely no chance whatsoever of being elected president.
7
@Prof Emeritus NYC
You mean none at all?
Will etch this on my eyeballs
Fulsome flattery
I am an enthusiastic supporter of Warren. She is smart, compassionate, honest, and hardworking. I love that she has a poet on her staff. I love that she is attending to storytelling, not just as a campaign tactic, but as a way to approach and understand and speak to all the varieties of American life and experience, citizenship, hope and possibility in the 21st century.
73
@James
Rather than bring on an outside unit, wouldn't we all be better off if we had adults as models for wider literacy themselves?
Like, couldn't Liz herself cite a fellow Oklahoman who envisaged "this land is your land, this land is my land"?
The author mentions that she is a poet. That's fine.
The author includes a link to a YouTube video of her reading and discussing her poetry. Not fine.
This question on the place of poetry in politics and politics in poetry has been asked thousands of times, and always answered in the affirmative. Why ask it yet again?
Because you have a book?
6
It appears the poet is responsible for running the numbers on Warren's taxation and spending plans
8
Geoffrey Chaucer, the wondrous late medieval English poet, also served the court of Edward III in a variety of important posts, including as secret envoy to the powerful Milanese condottiere Visconti and as Comptroller of the Port of London. John Milton, who wrote "Paradise Lost" (not to mention "Areopagitica," a pioneering free-speech argument), served the government of Oliver Cromwell as "Secretary for Foreign Tongues," managing the regime's voluminous diplomatic correspondence with other countries.
64
Thank you Owen in Cambridge! Nothing like history to teach us the present.
Alissa Quart's essay reads like something straight out of a 1930's leftist magazine like New Masses.
She and her pal Warren talk about the plight of the workers without realizing that these same proletariat they have canonized long ago rejected them and their Socialist beatitudes and vacuous plans to save humanity from itself.
The extreme left is attempting, as it did with Bernie in 2016, a Trojan horse takeover of the Democratic party.
Their own Socialist party is gone and its proponents have a new plan: takeover the Dems.
They didn't succeed before and will not now.
Centrists like Mayor Pete will win and kick out Trump.
Extreme leftist ideologues like Warren will only assure us of four more years of Trump.
5
@simon sez
Socialism is part of the Social Contract of every society. When Johnson published his dictionary in 1755 he gave us meaning in single words so we could write in something in other than the poetry that required either the context or our interpretation for understanding.
It has been 265 years and obviously the experiment has become a failure. It is 155 since Lewis Carroll introduced us to Humpty Dumpty who warned us about a world where words have virtually no meaning.
How can we talk about politics when your socialism is not my socialism. We can speak in French or we can speak in metaphors because simple words mean only what we mean them to mean.
1
@simon sez
If by "rejecting them" you mean "donate to their campaign" and by "Trojan horse takeover" you mean "leading in the polls" and by "is gone" (as in "the Socialist party is gone" you mean "has instituted policies like minimum wage, Medicare and social security that are loved by millions of Americans," and by "takeover the Dems" you mean "develop actual policies addressing economic inequality" then you couldn't be more right!
Poet Carl Sandburg was the personal secretary of Emil Seidel, socialist mayor of Milwaukee and Vice-Presidential running mate for Eugene Debs's surprisingly (relatively) successful campaign to be elected US President. This was reported in the Times by Dan Kaufman October 19 in his opinion piece "The City Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez Would Have Loved to Live In."
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@Paul Dobbs
Thanks for pointing out the connection. Love it!
5
If only Warren had a good campaign strategist...
3
No, we don’t need any poetry or inventive language, we just need someone with lower middle-class credibility who can get up on his hind legs and say “I am not Donald Trump“.
That would be Biden.
7
"Writing About Music is like Dancing About Architecture"
Versification about politics is like.....
Well - you get the drift.
And Frank Zappa said it - despite all the naysayers.
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@SteveRR
That's a good question; who would Zappa endorse?
Or would he even?!
1
Ms. Felix is a poet.
Now you know it.
All she has to do is have a funky beat and make the words flow with it.
I read the 1619 Project NY Times magazine issue cover to cover. The poems resonated as much as any of the text. Then I read a subsequent column by Charles M. Blow, which though prose, read with the same cadence and impact as though it was a poem from the 1619 Project. So, yes to a poet on the Warren team, and a poetic voice can express herself in prose just as well as in verse.
12
Although it may be growing in significance now, rap and its issues supplanted folk music and political poetry(even Carolyn Forche has moved away from political issues) more prevalent in my generation. Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan was some of the background in U.S. when Victor Jara and Violeta Parra were poetizing and singing the songs the students marched to in Chile at time I was a teenager there.
Poetry was dangerous then: Victor Jara was captured, tortured and killed in the stadium in 1973. A fashionably Marxist student from a rich South American family threatened to shut down the poetry society my friend and I founded at L.S.E.because it was too bourgeois--not any Mayakovsky.
Poetry was dangerous then: A year before, listening to Yevgeny Yevtushenko reciting Babi Yar, on stage in New York before Edward Muskie was introduced, Jewish Defense League, ironically, ( to protest Russian treatment of Jews or cultural appropriation by Yevtushenko, don't know motives) jumped on stage and hauled him down. Muskie never came out.
When we recited pre-rap poetry, with jazzy background but politically sharp lines in Miami, everyone knew where exits were in case F.B.I. about.
Feel my millennial son's generation deprived of all night sleeping bag poetry readings, street theater, etc. Yes, bring back!
6
One of the richest experiences a reader can have is to discover the poems of Wislawa Szymborska who wrote of torture, politics, death, war, loss, history and humanity at its worst with irony and humor. The Nobel Prize committee got its money's worth in 1996 by giving the literature award to this unique poet who opened a poem with such lines as "After every war/someone has to clean up."
13
Anna Akhmatova was of that same expression, to tell of being caught in a bad place at a bad time, while still holding on. Even in translation, the words would go straight to the heart and keep it alive. Also thinking of our American poets like Dickenson and Whitman who wrote through the worst times of the Civil War, in full throated mental and emotional truth.
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@Luccia
I was introduced to Akhmatova in college. "Being caught in a bad place at a bad time, while still holding on" is a great description - of her time and our own.
7
Three cheers for Akhmatova. Now there is a woman who persisted under inhumane circumstances and gave us glorious verse in return.
6
Trump to impose sanction on Turkey
After giving them the key
Moving the US troops out of the way
Turkey invades Syria where Kurds held sway
The Kurds fought and died for the USA
So our young men wouldn't have to pay
The Islamic Caliphate on Syria soil
Out of the Iraq state they did recoil
In absence of US power
Russia marches in and American troops cower
If trump gave permission for Turkey's advance
trump should sanction himself in this kabuki dance
6
Trump's apologists: "Take him seriously, not literally."
Ignorance, incoherence and evasive duplicity can pass for poetry, to the sympathetic ear.
And we want more of this?
3
Thanks Ms Quart,
Sans any research, I am inclined to think that the most lasting of our political rhetoric has been, in genuine meaning, poetic; while at the same time being accurate. This assertion is, as you suggest, contradicted by the current noise from the White House, which is neither accurate nor elegant. I hope you are correct that better times are coming.
2
In the dark streets where we walk
there's a deep need for uplifting talk.
O there are plans galore and even more,
but we need to see the sky and hope to soar.
There's room much needed room
across sweeping plains we can zoom
over purple mountains where we can see
that Liz will lead where we all can be.
30
Poetry lifts our language and shows us its facets, its uses beyond the ordinary and reveals the richness of ideas like no other form. When I was younger, poetry was "difficult" or "not worth the trouble" but the fall of political and civic discourse and personal losses and pain drove me back to a form more suited to the vicissitudes and complexity of life. It's where I have found solace and hope.
Senator Warren's oratory has been lifted and is, at times, poetic and vastly more effective.
Here's to poetry; lets everyone get some!
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@Juno To your last line (and apologies, this isn't exactly poetic): totally, dude(tte)!
3
More desperate pandering by EW along with her reparations and billions of dollars plan for combating segregation. So glad people are seeing through this act and Biden a true progressive with pragmatism is the front-runner.
13
@Mark
Surely you jest.
1
No.
Narrative, whether it's poetry, prose, music, painting, cinema, PowerPoints, or graffiti, is a serious problem in politics. Narrative is the credible-sounding alternative to facts that his White House uses to twist minds and cheat the law. Narrative is what Trump uses to extricate himself from the net of facts closing in upon him.
We don't need more narrative. Poets, sure, but not in political campaigns where argument based on cold logic is wanting right now. Logical thinking has never stopped a good speaker from sounding elegant and articulate, but there is such a thing as gratuitous elegance. We need less of that and more plain spoken truth.
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@Next Conservatism
Yes, we do need more "plain spoken truth". But if you've come to believe poetry is not brimming with truth, or that it cannot be plain spoken, then you're not familiar enough with poetry.
Just off the cuff, some poets whose work -- essays and novels as well as poems -- are well worth seeking out: Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, Tony Hoagland's essay Twenty Poems That Could Save America. But be/aware, the truth can be read and process. Some poets' work is sharp to wounding, astounding in their power.
I've always thought the US Poet Laureate should sit on the floor of Congress, make themselves known and heard, and available for consulting to the Supreme Court, the White House and all our different govt offices, and to any and all elected officials.
"The soul sings for justice, and poetry is the song." -- Natasha Trethewey, US Poet Laureate (2012-2014)
Some links, and there are many, many, more, to help you on your way.
"...poems related to Election Day, including poems about voting, politics, America, and the power of speech and choice.": https://poets.org/poems?field_occasion_tid=1751
Independence Day poems: https://poets.org/poems?field_occasion_tid=1812
MLK Day poems ("...his dream—not just the American Dream of economy and success, but a more inclusive dream of peace, multiplicity, and equality...."): https://poets.org/poems?field_occasion_tid=1491
Democrats need to focus on who makes up the electorate. In the last congressional elections the Democrats flipped 40 seats of those only two were progressives. This should speak volumes to all us. Here in the Midwest (which is needed to win the presidential election) I don't believe there is the support for anybody that is perceived as a socialist.
8
@Conrad TY!
@Conrad , perceived maybe by listening to Fox lies. No socialiist is Liz.
1
@Conrad
Yeah, just because that socialist WON the Midwest in the last Dem primary, which the self declared moderate lost, doesn't mean he will again. Agreed.
Let's look at some Midwest polls of late...
Emerson polling Oct. 3 Ohio;
https://www.cleveland.com/politics/2019/10/ohio-poll-shows-donald-trump-behind-joe-biden-bernie-sanders-and-elizabeth-warren-in-possible-2020-matchups.html
Biden narrowly led the field with 29.2%, followed by Sanders at 26.6% and Warren at 20.6%.
Hmmm...seems the socialist is still doing ok.
Lets continue...
While only a single poll, the Trump’s head-to-head matchups have Sanders beating Trump 53.1% to 46.9%. Biden 2nd over Trump 52.6% to 47.4%. And Warren narrowly squeaking at 51.6% to 48.4%.
Dang, seems that socialist is ahead of EVERYONE at beating Trump in Ohio.
But yeah...Conrad doesn't believe.
Guess it won't happen.
Lol...NotMeUs
1
Of all the worn out cliches "The American Dream" is the most irritating. It's the favorite of every dimwitted politician and unimaginative propagandist. And it's a lie. For most people - including most Americans - The American Dream is just that, a dream, not reality.
5
@archer717 Years ago, an article in the NYT Magazine had an article with a quote that has stayed with me that reads something like “The only people who understand the American Dream are immigrants and the wealthy and well traveled. For all other Americans, it’s merely the social compact”.
Immigrants understand the American Dream because they know that the vast majority of countries in the world, even ones that are touted as (socialist) paradises, pale in comparison to America when it comes to giving hope and opportunity to its citizens. The wealthy and well traveled have similarly seen the alternatives, and often been shocked by the desperation of the lives of people (in poor countries) and/or the stultifying provincialism and forced conformity (much of the “old world”) they endure.
There’s always room for improvement. But the American Dream is not a cliche.
4
Words hurt. Words heal. Words destroy. Words give birth.
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@Brucer
Words recall.
And that’s not all.
Words in film scripts also allow – images, such as at the end of “The Post,” where the Watergate night cop just doing his duty stumbled on Nixon’s burglars – film images which recall the same men-with-flashlights as kept Forrest Gump from sleep.
Any good song echoes other songs. Any good mural or photograph reminds of us predecessors which earlier tugged human hearts.
The college-educated elites who implemented the Powell memo of 1971 were all severely embarrassed by the long-haired, patchouli and sandalwood-smelling, flower-strewn messiness of those with their guitars and songs, backpacks and back pockets holding Hesse, J. D. Salinger, Akhmatova, Neruda, Philip Levine, and the first Wendell Berry of that era.
The elites then had two goals: to neuter academe and all that imaginative messiness, and to kill off the American middle class.
Did the Powell memo strategies succeed? Maybe a few words from more unlikely sources will recall.
@Phil in the mountains of Kyushu Hi, Phil, how's the view? I would describe Hesse as being like many of us back in the days you refer to; Pessimistic Idealists. I learned a lot about myself by reading him, but I learned much more by listening to my elders with scepticism.
1
@Brucer
The view here takes in swelling mountains of black, old volcanic basalt, covered in bamboo, fir, maple, ornamental cherry, and camphor (as the one beneath which Totoro lived).
Many Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, bonsai displays, miniature gardens, and all the rest from nature which modernity seeks to pave over, and modernity's schools program to ignore, totemize, marginalize.
Hello to your own good, nearby Ann Arbor, and its old bell tower, which Frost so looked on in "Acquainted with the Night."
The country is begging for a candidate who listens and is empathetic to voters’ misery. Because, notwithstanding the low unemployment, the economy is feeble and not working for families across the nation. The establishment keeps saying that only “centrism” makes sense. That voters will repudiate anything other than the status quo. Fresh and innovative ideas for our times are deemed “radical left” or “socialist”. And what do innovative candidates call for? Affordable healthcare, good public schools, affordable higher education, pay equity, infrastructure renovation. What’s so radical about any of these ideas? Nothing. What’s criminal is that Jeffery Epstein, for one, benefited from the Trump’s tax cuts. Enough said.
36
Sorry, but my impression of poetry is: the only people who read it are poets, and the only person who really understands a particular poem is the one who wrote it. What we really need in contemporary political discourse is an injection of humor, or at least lightheartedness, or at least a reduction in the sour, nasty rhetoric that comes not only from Trump but also from a lot of other politicians.
10
@Steve Schroeder
I think your conception of poetry may be too narrow. There is a long tradition of satirical poetry in English. The final lines of Alexander Pope's The Dunciad, first published in 1728, apply today .
Thy hand , great Anarch, lets the curtain fall.
And Universal Darkness buries all.
7
@Steve Schroeder
We need poetry, but sometimes, I agree we need to keep it more light hearted as well. We need cheering up when facing bleak landscape that divides us from family, friends. For example, regarding the RHC vs Rep. Gabbard war of words: HRC shot herself in the foot figuratively in her presidential campaign. Imagine her possible injuries if she tangles with and is defeated by a real military veteran in debate or staged Wrestling match. Let AOC officiate since she has an opinion on everything. (contribution from best friend from old happy days) Thank the party that is Saturday Night Live.
1
@Steve Schroeder
She needs to be funnier, like Amy K (who should be her running mate).
The answer for nicknames is funnier nicknames.
Pocahontas vs PaunchyHaunches
5
Art -- including poetry -- invites us to experience the world more vividly, from through different lenses, and as fuller human beings. Hooray to Warren and hooray to Ms. Felix! More artists in public and explicitly political places!
93
@minkairship
Warren's refrain,"we will not lose this house," echoes D.H. Lawrence's poignant short story, "The Rocking horse Winner." Lyricism carries one over threshold where intuitive knowledge takes over from stumbling block of logic. It's uplifting for downtrodden, but dangerous when spewed by those who would manipulate and control us. Agree with division outlined by Eamon, below, quoting Cuomo, although heard it before him from another source, that "we campaign in poetry but govern in prose."
6
George W. Bush mangled the English language but managed to keep the top political job for eight years. Trump's avoidance of any language remotely resembling the literary is interpreted by his base as straight talk from the gut of a truth-sayer. Republican strategists are expert at crafting simple but false messages that are repeated with mind-numbing frequency, while warning Republican candidates to stay on script, and save the literary stuff for the local book club.
13
@William
Yes, and what we have is a president who doesn't read, anything, and his base that doesn't even think. Enough.
8
Obama was “good” insofar as his contrast was with his immediate predecessor. Frankly, the rhetorical style of most politicians in my lifetime has been nothing inspiring. TV and its virtual successors as “cool” transmission meda have changed what once was primarily direct in-person (or live radio), and not for the better. (Then again, I am not sure I could stand through a live barn-storming speech of the likes of William Jennings Bryan, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson – all much-acclaimed orators a century ago).
FDR’s style is the one I like, frankly – not surprising because he along with MLK were the public speaking benchmarks I grew up with, as it were, although MLK’s is a specialist preacher type, even if applied to a secular context.
Some of FDR’s best efforts were in his 1936 reelection campaign – this is what Senator Warren would LOVE to be able to channel but I am not sure it “reads” the same today – FDR’s delivery was simultaneously warm, cool – and mischevious - particularly his acceptance speech at the nominating convention in Philadelphia and the last campaign address at the end of October in Madison Square Garden. Read them today and it's all fresh, except for the expectation of a daily familiarity with the Christian scriptures for the intended resonances, which expectation doesn't obtain today (the same is true for MLK speeches, btw).
5
Let's remember, though, that politicians who employ poetic license for storytelling are not cut the same kind of slack that actual poets are in terms of fictional inaccuracies.
And a note on a phrase that is not only inaccurate, it's incendiary: ethnic cleansing, like what Trump opened the door for in Syria, is not cleansing-it is genocide. Accuracy matters today more than ever.
8
@common sense advocate
Anglo-Saxonic diction best for truth-directness--No Norman inspired French or Latin phrases except for diplomacy. (but confess to immense enjoyment listening to William F. Buckley's "Firing Line" (Margaret Hoover doesn't come close); even if disagreed with most of what he said, charm and poetry of language has its place.
2