I came upon this article recently, “Poems of Resistance: A Primer” in The New York Times and it talks about a “tsunami” of poems coming out right now, both new poetry and readers looking for political resistance poetry. Such an amazing time to be writing and reading. That article points to another piece, “American Poets, Refusing to Go Gentle, Rage Against the Right.” Also in January 2017, Poetry Foundation printed its list of favorite protest poems we should all work through.

I myself have purchased multiple volumes of political anthologies.

If You Can Hear This: Poems in Protest of an American Inauguration (2017) – these are some hot-of-the press reactions to the Trumptastrophe by a diversity of writers including plenty of LGBT writers. I just finished it. It’s full of amazing poems. Some very dark, some very inspiring. Some of my favorites:

H.K Hummel’s “A Brief History of the Leer”
“Pirate Jenny” by Erik Schuckers
Jeremy Brunger’s “Gay Sex Kills Fascism”
“Pigeon” by Isiah Vianese
And the final poem, “We Know How to Do This” by Mary E. Cronin

Love Rise Up: Poems of Social Justice, Protest and Hope (2014) I just started this one and beyond some disconcerting typos, I’m amazed at how many poems are relevant and seem apropos of the current Trumptastrophe like “Seven-Hundred Mile Fence” by Eliot Khalil Wilson and “Lawrence Learns the Law” by Margaret Rozga, a poem that predates Black Lives Matter and media coverage of the black victims of police shootings but illustrates exactly the arrest issues that were occurring in Ferguson, Missouri. There are also “after-the-election" poems but they’re about Obama’s inauguration and serve to remind us of what that election meant. Trump not even a blip in the anthologies consciousness, although he had already been racist-ing it up in 2014 with his birther propaganda.

  Speaking of Black Lives Matter, the beautiful anthology, Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (2016) is an amazing book of art and poetry by contemporary black writers and artists. If you’re looking for a coffee table book on Black Lives Matter as signal to your right-wing friends and relatives, this is the book. I found many new poets in here I’d like to research more, like Thomas Sayer Ellis (“The Identity Repairman”), Reginald Harris (“New Rules of the Road”), Terrance Hayes (“Some Luminous Distress”), Major Jackson (“Rose Colored City”), Quraysh Ali Lansana (“statement on the killing of patrick dorismond”), Haryette Mullen (already on my radar but is represented here with “We Are Not Responsible”), Evie Shockley (“x markst the spot”) and Lamont B. Steptoe (“Such a Boat of Land”).

Also, don’t forget Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen and Ligatures by Denise Miller.

Against Forgetting: 20^th Century Poetry of Witness is an old standby, with over 700 pages of protest. This is literally the textbook on protest poetry but it can also serve as an international anthology. I’ve known about for a while but was never tempted to dive into it. Then I did a search recently for political poetry and I found a class in International Political Poetry from Portland Community College (unfortunately not available online) which listed the book in its syllabus. I’m reading it next.

It’s organized by categories of  atrocity: Armenian Genocide poems, (watch for more on these poets in my Cher blog), World War I and II poems, Soviet Union revolution and repression poems, Spanish Civil War poems, Holocaust poems, repression in Eastern and Central Europe poems, dictatorship in the Mediterranean poems, Indio-Pakistani War poems, Middle East War poems, repression and revolution in Latin America poems, American civil rights and liberties poems, Korean and Vietnam War poems, African apartheid poems, and democracy in China poems.

And there’s nothing like extreme right-wing wig-outs to send you into the arm of Warren Beatty and Reds. There were pros and cons of watching this movie again since the first time at 10 years old when my parents dragged me to it. It was much less boring this time. The old talking heads are hilarious now, completely contradicting each other and misremembering history. They aren’t the stodgy authority figures I remembered them to be. Jack Nicholson: his best performance IMHO. He totally inhabits playwright Eugene O’Neill. But on the other hand, I’m also not completely “in awe of the epic” as I once was. Beatty’s direction seems a bit too much like a Woody Allen rip off now, (note the outdoor walking-and-talking scenes particularly).

I love to watch movies about writers, especially if there are scenes of them actually trying to write. Beatty, as journalist John Reed, does have scenes struggling over writing and editing, critiquing Louise Bryant’s writing (which she doesn't handle well), debating ideas (almost as much fun to watch as actual writing). There was a journalism poem recited in the movie I started looking for. I tracked down the book The Complete Poetry of John Reed. It was disappointing. His poems are amateurish and oddly un-political.  “America 1918” is mostly a Whitman redux. Reed was a famous journalist and although he’s often listed as a poet, his complete works are literally only 60 pages. There’s a good poem on Manhattan. The movie Reds references two of his poems: “This Magazine of Ours” about his work for the communist magazine the Masses but it’s a frustrating read with too much abstractness about ultimate truth. The other poem referenced is his final poem before his early death, “A Letter to Louise.” 

More about Reed John Reed. 

Other new resistance and protest poetry anthologies are coming out as we speak!

Resist Much Obey Little

Poems for Political Disaster (Chapbook)

Resistance, Rebellion, Life (Out May 23)

Last Christmas I received this anthology of erotic poems, Poems to F*ck To, edited by Jason Brain (2015).

Here’s is almost 200 pages of sex poems that are much better than the red-faced, skin-blotched, badly-lit, very unromantic or sexy cover photograph implies.

Another surprise, this book was very professional laid out, (no pun intended), and, in fact, I found zero typos. Zero! This is an amazing feat for a CreateSpace book. And the anthology was lacking the many clichés I was anticipating. Some very creative descriptions and various types of sexuality were represented. There were ars poeticas and many literary references including some to Shakespeare and Georgia O’Keeffe.

These were very present poems, meaning they mostly took place in a present tense. They explored bodies, gender, and even philosophy. There were free verse poems and forms, including a memorable villainelle. Many poems were not only lustful but very wishful thinkings. But some smart poems in here, a few that reminded me of the best of Eric Jong.

I kept track of the authors and the gender breakdown (as far as I could determine):

• Men: 63
• Women: 60
• Ambiguous It’s Pats: 18

The book was pretty evenly represented.

For such a large anthology, curated sections would have been helpful (and pleasurable).

I have a few book reviews that got lost in the shuffle of all the politics last year. This one, Ghost Girl by Amy Gerstler (2004), I picked up at a big book sale in an independent bookstore in Santa Fe. It took me a while to get into because it felt quirky and flat, somehow too translucent to connect with. It’s very possible I was simply learning how to read Amy Gerstler.

By page 18 I had found my sea legs and plenty of poems I liked, including the poem “Fuck You Poem #45” which is a particularly satisfying list poem, (especially considering there might possibly have been 44 previous attempts). The poem “Listen, Listen, Listen” seemed very apropos of our current cultural and political divisiveness. (I wrote that sentence before the election even.) A little sample: “Just the mass of noise and listening to turtles for dear life.” There’s a poem in the voice of the dog called “The New Dog,” which worked better than these poems usually to. There were also poignant poems about death, including “Watch” and “A Widow.”

In the second half of the book, I was checking the title of every poem, my version of a LIKE: “On Wanting to See Ghosts,” “Circus Poster,” “Pastoral Opera Synopsis,” “The Ogre’s Turbulent Adolescence,” (you can figure out the fabulous subjects from these juicy titles). “Domestic” was a great poem about not picking up after someone you love. How great is that?

I loved the full-frontal sexuality of Gersler, (as I did with Amy King). “Ode to Semen” is really good. There are plenty of unrequited love poems here as well. I particularly liked “Swans,” a meditation ending with the line, “These trees can neither run/nor trudge, yet they flower and flower.” “Denial” is great in this vein too, ending with “I write/a poem entitled ‘The History of English Lettuces,’/This isn’t it.”

“Poem That Spills Off the Page” is a list of random answers without questions that actually ends abruptly off the edge of the page in a really satisfying way. These are juxtaposition experiments here too that I like because they have something more connective in them beyond free-association thinking, which feels a bit threadbare at this point. 

I look forward to checking out more of Gerstler.

Last year I started a difficult book club reading group with Monsieur Big Bang and some friends from the graduate writing program from Sarah Lawrence. So you guessed it: this group is very white. Our first book was David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. We followed that with White Noise by Don DeLillo and now we’re reading Lucia Berlin’s Manual for Cleaning Women.

We're unabashed intellectuals and politics are always part of our discussions, especially as the U.S. elections fell like a hammer into our first year's meetings. Two women in the group recently recommended Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine as one of the best books they’ve read in a while. One of the daughters of the members even said they would join the group if we picked that book as a selection, (which we probably won’t because so many of us have already read it). But these poems do have an unexpected connection back to Infinite Jest as both comment somewhat ruefully about tennis tournaments.

As soon as it was recommended to me I was in a hurry to get it because I’m now ravenous to read political poetry.  This book, most famously, covers police violence deaths, each new edition adding names.

But this book is also an amazing psychological investigation on micro-aggression. And if you think of micro-aggressions as unintentional (and therefore innocent), the mistakes of ignorance or language, (like accidentally mispronouncing Cantonese and offending a native speaker), this book show you the fine points of what it really is.

I would say this is required reading in light of the political realities of today. More on Claudia Rankine: Who Is Claudia Rankine? The Poet Just Received The MacArthur "Genius Grant" (Bustle)

It feels like the black lives matter movement lost some steam when Trump was elected. We have so many problems now competing for our attention. Rankine’s book is a good reminder to revisit books of poetry dealing with accelerating police violence and dehumanizing black people. Forget micro-aggression for a second. This is macro-aggression.

One of the runners up of the Rattle chapbook competition was Ligatures (for black bodies) by Denise Miller which I was lucky enough to receive as a subscriber last year. It’s 35 pages that pack a big punch.  You can can get a copy for six dollars and it’s well worth the price.

We all follow particular subject threads in our reading. I keep following the trail of New Mexican poetry. Monsieur Big Bang and I recently visited the a place south of Santa Fe called El Rancho de Las Golondrinas. This is a beautiful and quite expansive living history museum depicting the history of the Spanish Colonial immigrants who settled along the Rio Grande.

I check out every museum or college book store to see if I can find new local poets writing about "place." My project is twofold: learn something about how the neighborhood poets view particular places and support those bookstores who stock local poets.

This is how I found an amazing chapbook by Rafael Lobato, "Working in the Sun (Un Campesino en el Sol)" which was published in 2000 and  translated by Deborah Melendy Norman. The 21-page chapbook contains only seven poems but I enjoyed all of them: poems about relatives, outdoor labors, the Rio Grande and New Mexico history, growing up in rural New Mexico, cultural changes and challenges, and strategies of flirtation (warnings of a misspent youth). 

From "This Was My Life"

When you live, you lack everything.
When you die, you leave everything.

From "Welcome to the Ranch of the Swallows"

The Spaniard who slept here
Died very tired—I can feel it.
His feet struck so deep
In the sands of time
Not even the wind
Can erase his place in history.

Amy King's The Missing Museum (2016)

A month ago I received a review copy of Amy King's new book of poems, Missing Museum. I know only a bit about Amy King from Goodreads, reading news stories about writers who are aggravated Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize, and seeing her on one of the ModPo MOOC panels. I also quoted one of her essays in my eBook, Writing in the Age of Narcissism. But I hadn't yet had an opportunity to read her work.

In this book I was initially fascinated by her creative but non-integral titles like “Pussy Pussy Sochi Pussy Putin Sochi Queer Queer Pussy” and “One Bird Behind One Bird” and "Imperfect Yet.” The titles felt like random good lines being put to good post-modern use. The first and ending poems also experiment with ALL CAPS, making them challenging little book ends. If every poem had been in ALL CAPS, I'd probably still be reading them.

Once deep into the poems, they reminded me of poems by Jim Carroll due to their kind of gritty, skin-ripping quality. Or Henry Rollins. These poems are unkempt, full of street-intellectualizing that is delightfully pushy.

She had me in the prologue with "purveyors of knowledge, but too, your emotions are an intelligence.” Not only is this a defense of the emotional, I feel the entire set is writing about various intelligences: equations, indices, data, “math life,” points, beliefs and theories that aren’t adding up. In “Pussy Riot Rush Hour” “we incomplete ourselves.” In “Violent Blossoming Cities Ask How to Hear the Song” you can “centrifuge yourself.” These feel like riffs that solve for disruption.

In the book's back-advertising, John Ashbery is quoted describing King’s poems as “abstractions to brilliant, jagged life, emerging into rather than out of the busyness of living.” That’s a good way of saying it (I guess). She's writing in a very intense now-ness. But I would like to separate King from Ashbery here because I think she’s moving in another direction from the Ashbery school. These poems move in and out of accessibility. There are bits of straight-shooting I loved in poems like “A Room Without Walls” invoking whiskey and Lionel Richie. There's movement here where some Ashbery-students stall. She's not stuck in the same whirlpool of an old experiment. Literally, “the room opens into a field.”

King can give even her enigmatic-ness a precision in one section but then provide some slack and sense in another. We relax from earlier abstractions and the contrast is satisfying and interesting.  There's also emotional directness at a cerebral level. Here's where we push to escape agendas, both sexual and poetic. In "The Little Engine’s Death" she wonders, “am I hiding in the shotgun’s sexual agenda?” King is not afraid of feelings. And I can't help but think back to her essay on exclusion in today's poetry world when I read a line like this from "My Singularity is Self-Inflicted,"

Tonight I am in the museum of my life, and you have an inflated sense of signature.

And we're back to realism in a poem like "Your Heart, The Weight of Art, " which reminded me of Neruda:

Sometimes I see what isn’t there, and that includes Love,
as if some parlor trick is inherited from my great grandmother
of the mythical Cherokee variety. But she was no soothsayer, and I’m
            just alone
now, with the life that is in you calling mine out.

There's subversiveness around what makes us feel. From the poem "One Bird Behind One Bird:"

Too bad about the plate, the shadowbox, the twisted book.
The universe conspired, a felony against your face
in search of the tiny light that carves such things,
a grand piano to play, a poor painting by Paul Stanley
resembling the way I feel instead,

I also like "Drive By and Understanding the Poem" as a meditation on language and poetry, literally poetry as place and place as a congregation of those who wield power in Poetry.

 The poem’s also a handshake.

Her topics are also very up-to-date: guns, Baltimore, Muslims, gender identity, the Internet, (I always appreciate good capitalization on the word Internet), the Cloud, Americanness.

These poems are not solely games and juxtapositions. This is the difference between random and almost random. It takes more dexterity and I feel like there's just a smarter head behind it.

We are all cross-dressing
in tiny wings with the machines of bones to go on.