One Nation, Divided
In response to Nazi book burnings, Bertolt Brecht wrote in his poem "To Posterity", "Ah, what an age it is / When to speak of trees is almost a crime / For it is a kind of silence about injustice!" Indeed, facing the current wave of populism and its ill effects, I have often questioned how I can continue to do something so seemingly trivial as to write a poem.
Frederick Smock offers grim reassurance in his essay "Poetry & Compassion", pointing out: "Poets and intellectuals--who are paid little, and who are usually ignored by the general population--have this consolation, at least: they are the ones the tyrants go after first."
So perhaps it is not true, as Ossip Mandelstam believed, that, "only in Russia poetry is respected--it gets people killed." For example, the so-called "self-murder" of countless (and deliberately uncounted) poets and other writers in Eastern Germany is brought close to home in the 2006 German film "The Lives Of Others". The similarities between their climate of fear and ours are striking--from unscrupulous wiretapping to the dissemination of "alternative facts". They even had a wall.
In the film, Lenin is said to have remarked about Beethoven's "Appassionata" sonata that "If I keep listening to it, I won't finish the revolution." Like music, poetry, in its ability to embrace and elevate all that makes us human, runs contrary to the demonization and divisiveness required to divide "us" from "them", which is the first step to install an autocratic regime. Humanization is enmity's undoing. Poetry is one very powerful instrument.
Imagining what happens when just one person is inspired by art to make humane choices in a climate of terror and oppression--and doing it with sensitivity, spareness, and captivating pathos--is what makes this film a masterpiece. Furthermore, this film is not an Orwellian vision of the future--it is a look at the very recent past, and a grim warning for present times.
The Breakup
The ability to capture a people's imagination is more powerful and durable than any wall. Because an essential humanity exists in every citizen, sounding the note of truth can cause it to resonate further, faster and wider than any propaganda. It can turn us back into men and women, save lives, stop wars. In this way, every creative act--even a poem about a tree--can be seen as a form of protest.
In his 1991 essay "Can Poetry Matter?", Dana Gioia, lamenting poetry's demise, cynically observes of poets: "Like priests in a town of agnostics, they still command a certain residual prestige." I am reminded also of the aphorism that, "There are no atheists in foxholes." Perhaps we are reaching another foxhole moment in Western society, where the importance of poetry can transcend prize culture and fractious squabbling, and bring us greater solace and unity in these troubled, divisive times.
One beautiful example of this came after the first US executive order banning travel from seven Muslim-majority countries and barring refugees from Syria. The poet Kaveh Akbar began posting poems on Twitter by poets from these countries. Far from being overtly political, many were love poems of captivating sensitivity and spare desire. An act of personal inspiration grew universal as these poems went viral. Not long after, the order was suspended by US courts.
Though much of Western society is founded on principles of free speech and free exchange of ideas, such privileges can only continue to the extent that we remain vigilant and awake. Poems can keep us awake, and can inspire others to wake up. Truth demands a kind of insomnia. In an age of soporific sound-bytes and the collusion of government and media toward distraction, divisiveness, and war--perhaps only now are we discovering why poetry matters, and how much it means.
Portions of this article first appeared at www.robertpeake.com.