The Poetry of Activism
delivered to the advanced poetry workshop at Temple University, for Dr. Darla Himeles, April 11, 2022
In preparation for our time together and, in the last few years leading up to this moment of our meeting, I have often thought about activism. To be honest, I am not quite sure what the poetry of activism truly is. The word root brings one to act / action, and personally I can’t say how much my poems have influenced the world. While I care deeply about the possibilities of art and the ideal that it can raise or expand social consciousness, and while I too have a deep longing to help the world in whatever ways I can (sharing through these poems healing energies for peace, presence, nonviolence), in actuality I have a small circle of readers, mostly friends and family. So what then, is the efficacy of my activism?
A friend of mine will often say, “Poetry is a dying art form.” How sad this sentiment is to me. Though, one must deconstruct this thought to get to the heart of his place + time. No doubt, there is more poetry being written and published today than ever before. And by more voices, those who have typically been marginalized and pushed to the fringes, even silenced through violence and oppression. There are more online journals, ways to publish books, and social platforms that offer virtually anyone the chance to share a poem with the world. And you all here today are testament that individuals still care about poetry.
My friend, like me, grew up in a time before the internet, and he too has witnessed it take hold of our lives. While the world wide web has allowed for all these aforementioned possibilities for art and poetry, it also hyper-intensifies what people really care about. We see it in what goes viral, who becomes an influencer, and why a moment becomes a hashtag or a gif. There is a lot of noise in our lives and, consequentially, so much life to consider. I often wonder how this virtual connectivity has changed our abilities to be present and conscious in our own moment in time. Often, I wonder if the human mind can even manage as much information as what gets delivered to us on a daily basis. For better or for worse, the internet may have already surpassed what the printing press did near the turn of the fifteenth century and thereafter for the evolution of cognitive development in humans.
Personally, what does all this noise mean for me as someone who writes poems? It can be a significant distraction. And ironically, at times creates a sense of inaction. On a daily basis I struggle trying not to sink under feelings of irrelevance, worthlessness, abandonment. (I know that might sound heavy for some of you, but it is my truth.) And this truth makes it difficult to sometimes muster the energy that activism calls for, because it does call for a lot of one’s will, courage, and strength of mind. And the larger conundrum remains: the essence of the lyric poem, for me, is about the delicate qualities of music, about slowing the mind into a moment of time and awareness. How does one hear music without silence? And many of my poems are quiet little poems, so I return again to the question: what is the efficacy of my poems?
I simply do not know.
What I can say to you is this: I would probably not be here right now if it were not for poems. Poetry is the language in my heart, and its music remains my tethered presence to the world and this life of being a human. Maybe the only way I can define activism is this: live your best life, in and beyond these poems. Be present, be nonviolent. And offer space and freedom for all living creatures around you to also live to the greatest quality their living dignity allows. And, in return, I hope these poems nurture you.
David Crews
Shaftsbury, VT
Mohican / Abenaki ancestral land
*
History Lessons
She was fifty-six when she died, almost eighteen months
after setting off a national debate
whether the use of pesticides was responsible science
or technology gone astray
and the moral consequence mattered less to her critics
than the fact she was a marine biologist
and a woman
calling into question her personal character at every juncture
pointing out what they said was a lack of academic affiliation
or institutional voice and perhaps
the rhetoric machine of conservatism
would have worked some other decade
this was the fucking 60s
and shit was going down, and how
could someone really argue the fifty
plus pages of case studies
and principal source material cited in the endnotes
of Silent Spring, so no wonder
she would leave in her wake a grassroots movement
that would end up
banning the domestic production of DDT, advocating
that the slow poisoned destruction
of ecosystems and life probably calls into question
public policy mitigated by corporate interests.
It was at the age of ten Rachel Carson wrote a story
published it in a children’s literary magazine
and I’d like to think it had something to do
with the bluebirds
perched each spring on the soon to be
telephone wire outside her home
as they sang and sang just up the street
from the center of town
where Springdale sits along the Allegheny river
roughly eighteen miles north of Pittsburgh.
*
Saltmarsh Sparrow
Ammodramus caudacutus 5¼ in (13 cm). Once common sparrow with ochre outlined head, gray ear patch, spot-streaked breast and flanks. Specialist species. Inhabits narrow strip of salt marsh in and out Atlantic and upper Gulf coast. Member of the Sharp-tailed group. Differs from Nelson’s sparrow, likely seen at edge of marsh, found with skulking habits and faintly audible song. Solitary and secretive. Thought of by native peoples as storyteller, keeper of myths. Totem spirit. Nantucket carrier of calm seas. First recorded domestication of old world relative by Romans, arrived at the crucifixion. Lifter of souls, the words, Saint Francis. Difficult to keep as pet unless handled at young age, beloved Lesbia, Jane Scroupe. Life ends in sorrow and delicate embrace, holds no secrets of memory or time. Slight song of this little brown bird easily forgotten. Recent nesting sites found unavailable due to rising sea level and influx of superstorms. Population numbers, despite evidence, dwindling rapidly upwards of 9% annually.
*
Circadian Rhythm
After I remembered how he held his tea, gazed out
the window and I said how the leaves fall
litter the forest and he said perhaps more
dead pines at water’s edge or
dark poplars at night opening to full moonlight
the nightjar bracing the wind on the branch, just the nightjar
and the dirt as it freezes, hardens, so the moles go
deeper and the whitetails hungrier. Say it again, when will that black
bear find this trail and still before the last hundred years we shot
almost every one in these woods.
So then, it is the water carving its history into the mountain
but what if I want the mountain. You cannot
have the mountain or the barreds in the valleys
below it, even when the moose come to drink that moment
is theirs just the same. What’s the name of the fireweed
in the moose’s mouth or the sound of late winter fog breaking
into flocks of honking geese and that’s when he said
what then about poetry?
*
Poems first published in Stoneboat Literary Journal (2017), Lime Hawk Journal (2017), and Circadian Rhythm: Poems (Paulinskill Poetry Project, 2015), respectively.
