Dear Charlie Kirk, Founder of Turning Point USA:
It’s not every day that an American poet can address someone who thinks he is dangerous. For that alone I should thank you. We poets cherish our outlaw status; we aspire to be pariahs—poètes maudits, as the French say—even as we draw paychecks from schools. What would it take to make me an American Lorca? Could I qualify as Mandelstam light? You, of all people, help me to feel deeply subversive. You remind me that learning is the enemy of the Right. I’m referring, of course, to your Professor Watchlist, a catalogue of instructors who “advance a radical agenda.” Last month I joined its ranks, the only poet so honored. I am the envy of my friends; I owe you an ode.
First, though, let’s talk about form. I really love yours: the list. I know some folks who’d call it McCarthyist. I’ve heard others compare your site to the registry of Muslims that Trump’s surrogates proposed. They’re right, of course, on both counts—didn’t you see Trumbo?; don’t you know that the blacklisted win?—but they miss your obvious literary talents. We watchlisted profs are like the Iliad’s ships sailing toward you. We are epic in number and elbow-patched tweed. One might read your list as Whitmanic: we are “learner[s] with the simplest” and “teacher[s] of the thoughtfullest” (“Song of Myself”). We are a blason, that Elizabethan list of lover’s virtues, which you might address to me like so:
My professor’s lies are nothing, save this one:
Morality is mush in any state not red;
Of privilege white, he speaks with twisted tongue;
For Black Lives Matter, he’d shoot cops dead.
OK, I get that he’s well-read and bright,
Marshals facts, writes books, and spins out similes.
I know that new ideas could lead to new delights,
but still, why won’t he just agree with me?
I love to hear him speak, and yet I know
The Trumpet hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never heard a truth there blow’d
but God, my prof talks class till class is drowned.
And so, by heaven, he lays his bias bare
while I sit here, brooding silent in my chair.
(With apologies to Shakespeare’s 130th sonnet.)
The list, in short, can make for fine poetry. Yours has a poetic flair. I read it as a roll call of renegades from institutions that—in your mind—should offer nothing but platitudes on freedom, faith, and light. I get it now: we’re the fallen angels from Paradise Lost.
But here’s the problem: your Watchlist gives me more street cred than I deserve. I am no Allen Ginsberg or Pablo Neruda. I have marched against wars, but last did so when you were about nine. My crime is so mundane as to be laughable, but in 2016 it somehow ranks. Last fall I campaigned with a student group, the Wabash College Democrats. We hung posters, held phone banks, sent emails, and knocked on doors. We followed college protocol and were—in the great tradition of Wabash, a men’s college since 1832—gentlemen at all times. We were openly pro-Clinton and anti-racist, pro-woman and anti-Trump. We never silenced our opposition. We had no chance to; no organized opposition arose. (If there had, we could have held a public debate, each side learning in kind.) And this, I suspect, explains what happened next.
On November 4, 2016, a conservative online “newspaper” published an article attacking me for campaigning on campus. They printed my email, office number, personal website, and Twitter handle. (Someone at Wabash forwarded this to said “newspaper.” They raised no objections directly to the college or to me. They remain anonymous to this day.) The result? I was trolled on social media. I am “watchlisted” today. The article, which questioned my use of campus resources, was intimidation masquerading as journalism. Its true intent—just like your website—is to threaten and alarm. But I do not alarm easily, and I won’t be threatened by someone who can’t account for the facts. My “Watchlist” profile claims that Wabash sent a “campus-wide apology e-mail” on my behalf. This is not true, nor is the claim that I used some special “database.” Like any political organization on campus, the Wabash Dems and I used an “everyone” listserv to announce our events. That listserv is available to all. To assert otherwise is to sink deeper into our post-fact world.
Still, did we err? Did I? I am no lawyer, and I do not speak for the college when I say that email announcements are as mundane as lost keys. As far as your Watchlist goes, I am a dull provocateur. I engaged students in civic action; I never spoke for my college (this is key, according to the ACE), but for our student group. If you think I am dangerous, then the very notion of college—where we debate conflicting ideas—will send you scrambling back to Breitbart News. An education involves hearing ideas and political philosophies that you don’t support. The University of Chicago Democrats list their meeting times on the university’s website. (The Republicans too.) But you would have us retreat to our corners, addressing our like-minded friends. You claim to “fight for free speech,” and yet that is precisely what you target. As a finer writer than me once wrote, it is sometimes more expedient to claim “that two plus two made five.”
Charlie, I love poetry for a hundred reasons, but this one tops the list: poetry brings two bodies together, a reader’s and a poet’s. To read poems out loud is to build a transhistorical union across our unchanging anatomical forms. “I am with you,” Whitman writes, “you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence” (“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”). When reading this, we move our lips in sync with Whitman’s own. My favorite kinds of political action—canvassing neighborhoods, calling fellow voters—are similarly connective. I touch adjacent generations. I move laterally and locally while a good poem leaps three generations ahead. This year I talked with a woman who cast her first vote for Harry S. Truman. I convinced a black ex-Marine to vote despite the slow racial progress in the U.S. As with any election, success is incremental. I had my “fuck yous” and slammed doors. Still, poetry and democracy are a tandem affair.
And so, when you and your ilk attack the democratic process—Steve Bannon boasts of voter suppression; Donald Trump runs less for President than King—it gets under my skin. I know you’ve not set your gun sights on poems. I know that this isn’t, in the end, about my favorite art. Still, it saddens me to realize that your worldview is inimical to poetry’s power. Poetry thrives on ambiguity and linguistic pleasure. It cherishes complex thought. And, at its best, it draws people together. Its very engine—the act of making metaphor—assumes that two unlike things can join. A ballot box, in Whitman’s eyes, releases “countless snow-flakes falling” (“Election Day, 1884”). A pre-election moon is “bread,” for William Carlos Williams, which drops “into your baskets” (“The Approaching Hour”). Metaphor itself is democratic. Your Watchlist divides. It literally creates an us and them. It lacks nuance and guile. What’s worse, to write it you never had to leave your house. Your are an armchair activism who risks nothing at all.
There is so much we disagree about, Charlie—the existence of voter fraud (it’s a myth) and the menace of climate change (quite real); the privileges of whiteness (we share it) and the wrongness of autocratic boasts (Trump’s Tweets)—but this part troubles me the most: you would participate in our democracy by putting your enemies in a virtual pen. Not a tough job, really, but like so much on the Internet, you let others do your work for you. The Professor’s Watchlist does no actual “investigation” of professors. It just aggregates posts from like-minded sites. You are the Huffington Post of the pedagogically aggrieved. But how many doors have you knocked on for your candidates? How many miles have you walked for your truth? You’d like to be “known” on social media, or “liked.” Try being seen, on a crisp fall day, with no more than a clipboard and smile.
If you are looking for a new way to engage, Charlie, you might call our President-Elect and ask for a cabinet post. I suspect that you’re overqualified—unlike our future Secretary of Energy, you can recall the names of institutions you loathe—but I’ve got an idea. Do you have plans for January 20th? Can you be in DC? All Presidents need inaugural poets, even Presidents who do not read books. You just might be the most qualified wordsmith this President can hope for. Like him, you value volume over veracity. Like him, you bully with a smartphone in hand. You are the inaugural poet that Donald J. Trump deserves.