A while ago I was watching archival newsreal footage of a KLA rally in or
just outside of Kossovo. The rally featured KLA poets in camoflage uniforms
and red berets.
It took me back to the 60's and the BAM, I remember how no political rally
was complete without poets, usually in the manner of the Last Poets, dressed
in dashikis, backed by drums.
And I wondered: do Poetry and Politics mix?
Some say All Art is Politics--I think of Picasso's Guernica, Francis Scott
Key's Star Spangled Banner, The Aneid (as a poem written to put Roman
culture on a par with Greece's), The Iliad itself (to mourn the glories of a
Greece before the Dorian invasions) and the more recent examples of Kipling,
Neruda and Lorca (though he insisted he was not political he was adopted by
leftists and there is reason to believe that his murder was politically
motivated)
As actual poet politicians you have Byron and Mao.
One can maintain that the blending of art and politics leads to mere
sloganeering and propaganda, we discussed Baraka a while ago and many argue
that, as an artist he died when he made his art a platform for his political
views.
One can argue also that with Byron, poets make lousy politicians and with
Mao, politicians make lousy poets.
Still there is the rise of femnist poetry, and in African American history,
the very existence of a Phyllis Wheatley and her writing of poems was an
arguement against slavery. The fiery poems of George Moses Horton allegedly
influenced slave insurrectionists and abolitionists during the early 19th
century.
Another problem of course, is that by its very nature , politics, in which
the overriding concern and principle is the gaining of and retention of
power by almost any means and which involves compromise and jettisoning of
ideology when necessary--some state that the Left in the U.S. never
recovered from the shock of the Hitler Stalin pact--may be inhospitable
waters from artists, who are generally highly committed to principle at the
cost of any material gain.
Whatever one's view of it, poetry may always find a role in the political
affairs of people as long as it retains its power to touch, move, and
influence people.
Chris Hayden
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