Members of the Sunrise Movement occupy the office of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Did they recite poetry there? It occurred to me that a lot of my blog posts have been dancing around the question of the social “efficacy” of literature. That is, can literary writing (or any art form) incite people to action in the rest of the world and of their lives? Specifically, in this case, to militate for the mitigation of or adaptation to climate change.
Take poetry (please!). Prior to the nineteenth century, the question of whether poetry could be effective both aesthetically and politically would have seemed like a no-brainer, when you had people like Dryden, Pope, Swift, et al. writing politically and socially pointed poems that were read by a significant percentage of social elites. But by 1821, that sort of impact was neither obvious nor sufficient, prompting Shelley to declare that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Poets went from possibly making an impression on social and political debates in England to handing down laws for the entire globe – quite a jump! It is born of the anxiety that poetry had become a private, interior thing, rather than a public discourse. Literary and political discourse increasingly became thought of as different from, even opposed to, art. “Propaganda,” in our modern sense of the word, came into usage in the 1820s as well, and it wasn’t long before it was thought of as the antithesis of poetry – true poetry, that is. When W.H. Auden wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen,” he meant politically. And by the time he wrote it, he was A-OK with that; indeed, the statement arose from a long tradition that assumed poetry’s importance lay precisely in its lack of political or social efficacy. From Théophile Gautier’s art pour l’art to John Crowe Ransom’s statement that poetry’s usefulness lay in “its perfect inutility,” the assumption was that Poetry was both apart from the World and superior to it – not unlike the City of God vis-à-vis the City of Man, in Augustine. Clearly poetry makes something happen – people have attested to its importance in their lives, and who can say nay? The question is how that something relates to what happens in the streets and at the polling stations. In other words, it doesn’t make the same things happen that political organizing does. The question for our purposes is what those personal effects have to do with personal decisions, and what the politically/socially engaged writer can or should do with the information. It seems to me that any answer to that question has to consider both the textual form and the social form of the work of art. A poem (or play or story) can reassure you that what you think you already know is true. Or it can challenge your world-view. It can draw a picture or tell a story of utopias and dystopias, victories and defeats. In addition, a poem can be sent via letter or via internet meme: the first will reach a limited audience, the latter, a larger one. And a poem read aloud at a rally is different than one read in silence by oneself at home. So: does writing about one’s feelings about climate change purge you of those feelings and make you more “well-adjusted”? Or does it make you more pissed off than you were before? Is it a sublimation of political action? It’s easy enough to say, “I’m not a political organizer, I’m a poet; they do their job, I do mine” – even if there is a crying need and dearth of organizers and a glut of poets. Or does it galvanize you into organizing your community – and possibly leave poetry for the morrow to do so? Perhaps it can empower you merely by being “a focus of repose for the will-driven intellect” (Ransom again), thereby recharging one’s spiritual or intellectual batteries for the struggle. How to write literature that will do any of these things is another question. Upton Sinclair struggled mightily trying to decide on an ending to his novel The Jungle. Should it end with Jurgis Rudkus still in prison (“to arms – help comrade Jurgis – we must crush injustice!”)? Or with the victorious socialist majority celebrating their victory over capitalism (“¡Sí, se puede – ándale!”). The first risks creating despair (“the socialists are never going to win – the bosses have the guns and jails”), the second, complacency (“see – the revolution is already happening – without me!”). To my mind, asking poetry (or any art) to do political work is putting a lot of pressure on it – just as asking political organizers to turn their work into an art form would put a lot of pressure on them (and limit their effectiveness in the process). But climate fiction helps to give the effects of global heating a local habitation and a name – it helps me envision where we’re headed. And essays and poems often make me regard my values and actions – how I live my life in the light of my own mortality, not to mention that of most of the things I value. Maybe the best answer is to read a lot of different kinds of stuff – from scientific reports to concrete poetry, from science fiction to image+text work. If you’re a writer, you’ll write what’s important to you. It may or may not prompt you to any further actions; that’s likely to depend more on your disposition and understanding than on your art. But I encourage you to experiment – with what you write about (if anything), how you write it, and how you convey it to other people (if you decide to do so). All of these things are up for grabs in a way they’ve never been before.
1 Comment
10/2/2019 01:16:09 am
Thanks for your thoughtful exploration of this question. In this era of climate emergency, I am wondering about the differences between art works that deepen the cultural divide by alienating climate change denialists, and those which are educational, transformative and bridge-building. I suppose as the recipient of gifts from the muse, perhaps the artist just needs to create what is given and then watch the responses which ripple from the work? Some art may help us "save" our world, and other art may help us "savor" it...
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June 2021
Kristin Prevallet Author/Editor
I'm a writer & teacher in Lawrence, Kansas who actually believes the scientists. I wrote a book of poems called Of Some Sky that seems to have something to do with all this. |