Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” is going around again. W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” is circling through social media, as it did after September 11. Why do we turn to poems in the wake of national events like this election?
In an interview with Andy Grace on our podcast, Smith said:
We’re always turning to it. I think maybe people are catching onto something we do all the time, which is look to others to articulate things we’re having a hard time putting into words. I mean, I look to poems to do that for me all the time and I’m a poet, but I can’t always put my own feelings about things into words. I’m constantly trying, and sometimes I feel like I do a better job than others. But I’m always turning to poems. I’m turning to poems for happy occasions, too. When you’re a reader of poems, you can’t look anywhere without being reminded of someone’s perfect metaphor for what the trees you’re looking at look like. So I feel like I’m always doing that, and for people who don’t read poetry as much as we do, I think it just taps into something. It just–oh, yes!–that moment where something just sort of clicks. I feel it too when I read something that mirrors back to me what I’m feeling and thinking and worrying about in a way that helps me understand it better. It’s not just telling me what I already know, and reflecting my own thoughts back to me, but also making more sense of them than I could on my own.
As Don Share said in his recent interview with the Atlantic:
When people are under pressure of any kind, they turn to poetry. That’s why poetry is with us at the most important occasions in our lives: weddings, funerals, anniversaries. . . . Sooner or later, we’ll find that poetry has been waiting for us. You get this feeling that people can call on the poets when they need to, and that’s a great moment for poets—when they have an audience because we need to know how to go about reaching the next day of our lives. And that’s something the poets spend all their time thinking about.
And today in LitHub, Jonny Diamond writes:
So even as our hearts break, we go on living. For our part, as a publication invested in the power of books and literature, I think now is the moment to throw out lifelines, to do what we can to offer even the smallest antidote to the kind of despair that makes so much sense this week.
In my favorite response to the election, Dan Piepenbring wrote for Paris Review Daily:
I don’t want to add to the chorus of despair, because I do believe there’s a role for art at a time like this, and I don’t say that lightly—words like these don’t come easily to me. I would rather make fun of things, and I’m struggling against an inborn fatalism. (My iPhone just reminded me to water my plants, and I thought, why bother?) The creative impulse is such a fragile thing, but we have to create now. We owe it to ourselves to do the work. I want to encourage you. If you aspire to write, put aside all the niceties and sureties about what art should be and write something that makes the scales fall from our eyes. Forget the tired axioms about showing and telling, about sense of place—any possible obstruction—and write to destroy complacency, to rattle people, to help people, first and foremost yourself. Lodge your ideas like glass shards in the minds of everyone who would have you believe there’s no hope. And read, as often and as violently as you can.
Our readers shared poetry recommendations on Twitter. You can read the full list here.
Some favorites:
Tarfia Faizullah’s “Dhaka Aubade”
Adam Zagajewski’s “Try to Praise the Mutilated World”
Solmaz Sharif’s “Desired Appreciation”
Czeslaw Milosz’s “Account”
Jericho Brown’s “The Tradition”
Ocean Vuong’s “Eurydice”
Elizabeth Alexander’s “Praise Song for the Day”
Anne Boyer’s “what resembles the grave but isn’t”
Javier Zamora’s “Let Me Try Again”
Kevin Young’s “The Book of Hours”
Adrienne Rich’s “The Ninth Symphony of Beethoven Understood At Last As a Sexual Message”
Morgan Parker’s “All They Want is My Money My Pussy My Blood”
Jamaal May’s “There Are Birds Here”
Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B”
Robert Duncan’s “My Mother Would be a Falconress”
Muriel Rukeyser’s “Poem”
Eduardo C. Corral’s “To the Angelbeast”
William Stafford’s “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
Emma Lazarus’s “The New Colossus”
And of course, Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” (you can hear her read it here)