We Need More Poetry in Politics

Camonghne Felix became the director of surrogates and strategic communications for Senator Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign in June. She is also the author of “Build Yourself a Boat,” a debut collection of poetry that was recently included on the long list for a National Book Award. Ms. Felix’s writings describe sexual assault, firsthand experience of abortion, and police violence, including poems about the trial of George Zimmerman, the man who shot Trayvon Martin.

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Where Poetry Meets Journalism

For nearly two weeks in 2018, poet Doug Van Gundy and photographer Matt Eich interviewed residents of Webster County, West Virginia. They talked with gravediggers and teachers and diner cooks. They had coffee with an ex-military man who sold sawmill equipment; they visited the county clerk’s office, filled with boxes of election materials; they watched an elementary school Christmas play and concert. All along the way they asked those they met: What is it like to live here? What do you wish others knew about your life? With permission Van Gundy would record each conversation or take notes, and Eich would make photographs.

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Alissa Quart talks with us about the “dark poetry” of American politics

Through her work as both a writer and the executive editor of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, Quart is all about clueing people into what she calls the “dark poetry around them.” Thoughts and Prayers is no exception, dexterously speaking to the calamity and melodrama of our current political climate using the hybrid form of reported poetry. “I see this as a meta-text, a text around the journalism,” says Quart, a prolific journalist who has also written several nonfiction books on topics such as consumer culture and middle class precarity. “Sometimes journalism gets locked into the literal truth,” she says. “Potentially, a form like poetry or other kinds of more explosive, disruptive forms of culture could be telling the emotional truth of our period, especially the Trump era.”

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On the anniversary of the Las Vegas mass shooting, Alissa Quart shares a poem about gun violence.

The U.S. is a country plagued by gun violence. Its shadow looms everywhere — over school hallways, movie theaters, concert venues and homes. On this day two years ago, a mass shooting at a Las Vegas country music festival saw 59 killed and 527 injured. The statistics are sobering; the causes, well documented. But these horrific acts of violence are often met with the same empty words from political leaders, who offer “thoughts and prayers” but so little in the way of tangible solutions.

Author Alissa Quart’s book of poetry, Thoughts and Prayers, explores the darkness and numbness that is such a part of our current political existence.

As Quart told Teen Vogue, “The title poem is composed of the public language around mourning over school shootings in the U.S. or from political leaders and Web sites. I also sifted through the language that politicians of both parties tweet, what kids themselves said about mass shootings, and the words companies use in fabricating souvenirs that commodify mass killings.”

Read the full poem here.

David Berman of Silver Jews Remembered

The lead singer of the indie rock band Silver Jews, David Berman, died last month at fifty-two, a suicide in Brooklyn. While he might at first glance appear just another icon of Gen X, an embarrassing phrase back in the day that now it seems accurate, Berman reflected that generation’s ironic, dark hunches about existence. As he put it in one song:

What if life is just some hard equation
On a chalkboard in a science class for ghosts?
You can live again,
But you’ll have to die twice in the end.

The Silver Jews’ most renowned albums, The Natural Bridge and American Water, were made during the 1990s, a decade where the shrug was a key artistic gesture, albeit an ominous shrug.

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Let’s push the language of journalism past its limits

TWO YEARS INTO Donald Trump’s presidency, journalists and pundits seem hard-pressed for new, effective ways to describe each fresh outrage. That may be because we’ve reached the limits of journalism’s typical lingo and genres—of the blaring 24-hour news cycle, in which news outlets endlessly refresh their coverage of a worsening incident, framed by “BREAKING NEWS” chyrons that repeat our president’s racist Twitter commentary.

Read the full essay here here.