Steel and Fire; Poetry and Politics

“There’s something about poetry that communicates the heart of a populace in a way that prose just simply can’t.”

—Amanda Gorman

What matters:
the memory
of the poem
taking root in
thousands
of minds . . .

—Diane Di Prima
(from “Revolutionary Letter #110”)

These opening quotes come from a regular workshop we give at Poets Against Racism & Hate USA designed to explore the power of poetry to challenge injustice and change minds. Participants first grapple with defining social justice poetry and then explore how the craft of poetry as an art form can be used to maximize the messages in their own writing.

We say in our workshop that social justice poetry is born from outrage, is rooted in social concern, and exposes truths while raising consciousness. It’s the poetry of protest and dissent, witness and engagement. It is accessible and authentic.

The eighty-two poets featured in Wag the Dog got the assignment. Editors Nina Padolf and Deena November have thoughtfully selected poetry that explores a range of social and political issues confronting us today while fully tapping the genre’s craft. The poets come from across the United States (with one contributor from Australia), so the collection has a distinctly American orientation. The themes, though, are human, and therefore global. A colleague of ours from Poets Against Racism in the UK likes to say that as important as the themes are, we are poets first and foremost. The social justice poetry we write should be good art.

Good art in social justice poetry is born of evocative writing meant to conjure certain memories or feelings to mind, to elicit a response on a deeply emotional level. Its tools are sensory writing, storytelling, the use of concrete details, and personal experience.

In the pages of Wag the Dog, there is good art, tackling the travesties of ICE, conflict in the Middle East, corruption in Washington DC, environmental devastation, and social inequality.

Consider the evocative language in this passage from Mary Alice Dixon’s poem “Why Cordgrass Becomes an Invasive Species,” with its combination of rich images and the effective invocation of a national hymn:

In bed with oyster shells and grit, where marshland
meets the sea, I sleep in sand
until I hear my children crying, America, America,
I wake
to find my children dying from sea to shining sea,
in amber waves
of bleeding sturgeon, with broken hearts and fins, 
in shattered shells of loggerheads, trapped
by plastic sins. 

In “Minneapolis Winter,” Joanne Durham uses stark symbolism (crosses, votive candles) and rhythm like the ominous beating of a drum (“the gassed, bleeding, dead”) to transport us to scenes of conflict in Minnesota. Including detail of the Angry Catfish Bike Shop brings the lens of the poem from the philosophical to the local, and the personal:

Cross after cross shows up
on city streets heaped with snow.
Amidst strewn roses, votive candles,

a cardboard sign: Whatever you allow
your government to do to others,
it will eventually do to you.

Yellow DO NOT CROSS tape
blocked the state investigative team,
even the doctor from reaching

the gassed, bleeding, dead.
The Angry Catfish Bike Shop
plans a memorial ride across the city,

he was a cyclist, one of us.

Amy Le Ann Richardson’s untitled poem drips with sensual language and authenticity; the reader knows from the intimacy of her images that Amy came from this place “where fog still holds the mountains.” Her message, to look for the people still “standing in the weather,” reminds me of the advice of the late Fred Rogers, who told us all to look for the helpers in times of crisis.

At the edge of Appalachia
where fog still holds the mountains
like something sacred,
where green insists on returning
even after it’s been cleared,
even after the soil was asked to give too much.
Look at the people—
not the symbol,
not the promise,
but the living,
standing in the weather.
The ones who haven’t stepped away.
The ones planting anyway, hauling water,
opening doors to rooms full of paint and poems,
the ones standing up when it would be easier not to,
the ones making space where there wasn’t any.
This is the anthem…

In our workshop, we discuss with our participants that evocative writing is strengthened by observation. It is informed by research which leads to concrete details. Austin Schuh’s work “That Could Be A Poem” is an example of the poet acting as an observer. He uses repetition (“Watch the bombs…watch the war…watch the violence”) as a technique to draw the reader in and keep the momentum of the poem moving forward to its conclusion:

Watch the bombs drop and think
“That could be a poem” imagine the reception
Praise for my bravery speaking out against it
Watch the war start and think
“This could be a poem” Imagine the response,
A push back for criticizing “our brave boys.”
Watch the violence and think
“This could be a poem” Imagine the outcry
the hatred for an other never met because this is the way of the world
“This could be a poem” Imagine the silence.

In her piece “How to Slice an Apple the Morning After Renee Nicole Good is Shot,” Kimberly McElhatten uses a poet’s observational skills to draw us in. Her use of color, one of the key senses the reader brings to any poem, is especially noteworthy:

Pick through the bowl of apples to find the one you dropped this
morning. The one with the brown bruise and admire how its waxy
curves pop like a still life by Lilly Martin Spencer. Notice how the
yellow fades to red, and try not to imagine Good’s blood on the seats
of her burgundy Honda Pilot as you recite her name. A poet’s name.

Jan Beatty’s poem “Dropping Blotter Acid at the Slag Dump” invokes her personal memories of “exploding orange liquid against the blue-black sky,” “the smell of exhaust from passing cars,” and the tactile sensation of “lying on our backs in the field by the dump.” Here is a poet fully utilizing the craft of sensual writing to juxtapose the strange beauty of the steel mills in Pittsburgh with the devastating impact on the environment, and the health of the workers who labored there.

What did we know but steel and fire?
We’d wait for the jackknife—
watch those idle cars slice up the sky, spill their load
down the mountain, cheering
for the red glow,
for the deaths we knew nothing about yet—
our fathers who would die of lung cancer,
emphysema from the mills—

Several of the poems included in Wag the Dog show the effectiveness of writing poetry augmented by research. The combination of well-defined facts and a reaction to them adds a power to social justice poetry that calls out the status quo. Found poetry is a technique often used by social justice poets to introduce facts to spark reflection. Tina Barry uses the list of the Federal Government’s banned words to create an abecedarian poem, “Words Disappear Too,” that pulls back the curtain on the bigotry behind the words chosen:

Avoid: abortion, activists
Biases
Community differences
DEI Avoid:
Equal opportunity exclusion
Females feminism

In “Language Lessons,” Roberta Hatcher uses found text from an American ESL class to drive home the realities faced by immigrants being confronted by ICE:

Do not open the door.
If agents enter, say “I do not consent to this search.”
Ask for a warrant.
Remain silent. Say “I claim the right to remain silent.”

One of the handful of prose poems in the collection is by Susen James, whose “Word Search” begins:

The average native English speaker has about 32,000 words in their

vocabulary, a person with an advanced degree, approximately 45,000.

She goes on to relate these facts to the emotions of the events in Minneapolis:

None of them enough. An ambulance siren wails a human scream,
fractures time & repeats like incantation. Circling for the remainder
of forever what do they say about Renee bleeding out in the street?
The wilt in her eyes…

Sara Ries Dziekoński, in “The Mother Speaks,” creates a found poem from an NPR article quoting the mother of Aidan Ellison, a 19-year-old Black man shot in the parking lot of the Stratford Inn in Oregon over an argument about loud music.

There are two rules
here: smile
and be whitewashed, she says
because you can’t dance.
You can’t
have your music.
You have to talk
a certain way
because no one understands
what you’re saying.

She ends the poem with this mother’s devastating comment that her son, in Heaven, is now free to be Black.

Social justice poets don’t look away. They write from a place of outrage, of anger, of grief. Here is the powerful and evocative opening of “Moon Over Gaza” by Liz Rosenberg:

Moon over frozen water, moon over black wires,
crushed rubies splattering the shattered table.
Touching the toes of blue-footed children.

She ends the poem with “See what comes of any religion except kindness.”

Michael Simms, in his work “Tree of Life,” is unrelenting:

Somewhere a soldier is beating a boy
For throwing stones. Somewhere
A priest is raping a child.
Somewhere a girl in a marketplace
Has a bomb strapped to her chest.

My friend and her mother
Were in the Tree of Life synagogue
When a man who hated immigrants
Pushed through the door of their faith
With an automatic rifle.

Elsewhere in the poem he writes of Rashid who “is an atheist/ because his mother was killed by a bomb,” and a homeless man with a ukulele who sings Oh Susanna. “Tree of Life” is a poem that leaps off the page with its heady mixture of the beautiful and the tragic. In many ways, one of its stanzas could be the anthem for this collection:

And when he asks Have you been saved?
I want to say Yes!
I’ve been saved by poetry
From a childhood of abuse
And humiliation—
That’s a kind of miracle,
Isn’t it?

In the poem “The Poet Remembers,” Leonora Simonovis writes “after Czeslaw Milosz,” the 20th century Polish-American poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. She writes as a witness to the world torn, in words as uncompromising as her dedicatee:

That wounds fester unless tended to
that soldados came at night, raided our home,
beat our men, took our children
that we saw them fall, saw the red rimmed
eyes of the mountain, watching
that their machine guns woke the trees…

that fear does not leave the body
that the only currency is cracked bone and dry blood
that all we do is witness…

Wag the Dog is an inspiring example of the power social justice poetry to, as Diane Di Prima says, take root in one’s mind. The images born of outrage and observation, crafted with the evocative language of place and the senses, and fired by authenticity and passion linger as each page is turned. There is something for every politically conscious lover of poetry in this collection. Poetry purists will find sonnets, a pantoum, a shape poem, and prose poems among the many works of free verse. Readers will find a literary community of courageous, like-minded individuals concerned with the state of our politics, our country, and our world.

There is even hope. In “The Morning After the 2024 Election,” Joanne Durham introduces us to several women and their reactions. Alma stayed in bed, Kellia avoided her work’s break room, Elisa wrote poetry. The poem ends with Martha:

Martha spent all day explaining
to her daughter that we’ve been here before,
this is what courage is for.

Author’s note: Thank you to PARH USA  cofounder Debbie Allen for her input and editing.