The Poetry of Protest: A Dozen Pitfalls to Avoid
An essay by Marilyn L. Taylor
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Virtually everybody who reads poetry nowadays is undoubtedly aware of a vast—and relatively new—sub-category that’s become just about unstoppable over the past few decades: the poetry of protest. These are poems that won’t take no for an answer, refuse to take the world sitting down, never turn the other cheek. It’s poetry with an axe to grind, a complaint to register, a bone to pick—and it’s been sprouting up everywhere, in every anthology, blog and journal you can shake a fist at.
Most of us will approach one of these poems of protest knowing very well that it’s probably not going to be a mild-mannered meditation on some abstract controversy. On the contrary, the poems’ language as well as its tone is likely be volatile, single-minded, opinionated, emotional, or all of the above. And when it’s done well, the effect can be devastating. Think, for instance, of “I, Too” by Langston Hughes, or “The Hand that Signed the Paper” by Dylan Thomas. Or a whole raft of poems by Nikki Giovanni, Marge Piercy, Charles Bukowski, Amiri Baraka, Marilyn Nelson, Philip Levine, June Jordan, many, many others. But far too often, a poem of protest will totally bomb, missing its intended mark entirely.
Why is this the case? Why shouldn’t poetry that takes a stand against war, violence, oppression, discrimination, environmental irresponsibility, etc., win universal approval from everybody except the bad guys? My personal theory, which I realize may not be yours, is that the sheer intensity of the poet’s commitment to the cause can easily get in the way of the poetry. What started out as a good, strong poem will often morph into a collection of easy slogans and proclamations—frequently accompanied by the deal-breaking assumption that the reader agrees with every word.
Some poems of protest have succeeded remarkably well, of course. Several have actually galvanized thousands into action. A few have even survived their relevant moment in history and become a permanent part of the literary landscape. Henry Reed’s wrenching “Naming of Parts,” first published in 1946, is one these, and certainly Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”, which in 1956 broke all the rules of propriety, convention, and good manners, and changed the face of poetry in this country forever. An impressive number of other protest poems have succeeded without question—and I’m sure that you yourself could name others right this minute—but many more have evaporated into thin air, no matter how urgent they seemed to be when they were written.
But if you are deeply committed to a particular cause, possibly one that’s controversial, and you decide to write a poem about it, I’d like to offer a few tips that could help you avoid the potholes, sandtraps and bottomless pits that could stand in your way.
1. Avoid over-generalizing. Remember that old adage about finding the universal in the specific? It works. Working the other way around (by over-generalizing) can easily lead to making unfair, if not totally false, assumptions. To begin a poem with something like “Kids today! They don’t like school. / They drink and smoke and think they’re cool” is to make a big mistake. For one thing, the vast majority of kids today don’t hate school at all. They’re excited and challenged by it, and they think getting an education is what’s cool. Second, isn’t it likely that the poet is really thinking about one slacker in particular? Maybe a certain distracted one, or a frightened one? Or a bored one, who finished her term paper a month ago and has been playing video games ever since? If your poem focuses on that particular kid, it’s apt to make its point far more accurately and convincingly.
2. Do not preach. When you’re writing a poem on a subject about which you feel strongly, be very careful about taking a holier-than-thou approach. Sometimes it’s difficult to avoid when it seems as though no one out there understands the seriousness of a particular problem quite the way you do. But keep in mind that there are many, many causes out there, and to attract someone to yours means avoiding the accusatory. Here’s an example of the sort of thing I’m talking about:
Why can’t you see? Why don’t you listen?
When will you people finally understand
that (emissions/discrimination/deforestation/sexism) is intolerable?
The assumption here is that the poet sees it, but the rest of us are utterly clueless. It annoys us to be spoken to like that-- and the poem won’t work.
3. Avoid telling us what we already know. A poem that spends its time insisting that “Bigotry is wrong!”, as if that were some kind of a revelation, is simply not doing its job. Better to point out a specific, unambiguous example of bigotry, and give your readers credit for coming to their own conclusions.
4. Try not to get hysterical. If a poem begins with “Stop it, do you hear? Stop!! Stop!! You are destroying the planet!” -- the reader is sorely tempted to say, “Oh shut up” and go about his or her business. An irate, frustrated tone is perfectly okay, but a tantrum rarely succeeds.
5. Don’t settle for easy word-choices. Especially the angry ones, e.g. “Those dirty rotten ******** have ****** us again!” This is not to say that expletives—even the four-letter ones—don’t have their place in certain contexts. But the poet who uses them over and over again in the same poem runs two risks: (1) draining all the emphasis and punch from the words in question, and (2 ) sounding hopelessly juvenile. Let’s face it, we’ve all heard these words before, they no longer shock us, and there are plenty of fresher and more effective alternatives out there.
6. Do not ignore possible shades of gray: Super-highways are evil? Well, perhaps, in some ways. But what about the congestion they prevent? What about the time-deprived single mother who has to drive to a job in the heart of town? Similarly: if rich people are scorned as arrogant and selfish, what of the enormously generous philanthropists who so often come out of the woodwork to save the day? It’s wise to keep in mind that not every issue is a black-and-white issue.
7. Beware of the second person. It can come across as bossy, even accusatory. Jumping in with “Your candle burns at both ends. . .” drastically changes both the point and the tone of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s famous four-liner, “First Fig”. By accusing someone else—possibly the reader—of too much late-night candle-burning, the poem starts sounding cranky, like a disapproving parent.
8. Do not succumb to stereotyping. “Men are cold-hearted liars” is a line that runs the risk of alienating 50% of your readers, namely the men-- of whom many are pussycats, and honest, too. A proclamation like this might be fine in certain specialized contexts, of course, if the poet makes it clear that it is either not to be taken literally, or that it is one particular man she has in mind.
9. Do not sentimentalize: “The poor little homeless puppies / are wagging their tails for love” is pretty saccharine. Of course there’s nothing wrong with writing a poem to protest the inhumane treatment of small animals—but attempting to do so with clichés like “poor little”, “sweet and innocent”, “broken-hearted”, or “tear-stained” is a sugar-coated mistake.
10. Do not get too worked up about the trivial: There are certain small disasters that tend to fill the days of all of us. “My paper towels just don’t hold up” is not fodder for true protest. Neither is “dorm food is garbage” or “makeup is way too expensive” or “heavy traffic is a pain”.
11. Do not over-personalize: “I saw my boyfriend with that other girl”, might be sad, but it doesn’t qualify as a poem of protest because it involves no one except the speaker and her rotten boyfriend. A protest poem worth its salt speaks for many, about something that affects us all.
12. Avoid preaching to the choir. If you begin a new poem convinced that everyone who reads it will buy what you have to say because you are on the side of the angels, you are making a major mistake. There is likely to be a substantial percentage of your potential readers who hold the opposite view, and it’s your job to convince them of the error of their ways. No easy task, but an earnest, well-phrased protest against the status quo will almost certainly help.
Which brings us to an uncomfortable truth that we should remember every time we set out to write a poem that questions the status quo. W. S. Auden probably said it best back in 1939: Poetry makes nothing happen. And he’s right, of course. But when it’s well done, the poetry of protest can do a great deal to show that something very definitely should happen. And that, fellow poets, is more than half the battle.
First published in The Writer magazine, June, 2009.
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