I just finished writing a goodreads.com review for Bennett’s second book, Owed, and I wanted to call some attention to the book’s last poem, “America Will Be.” I have always been fascinated by the political poem. Not least because during the mid-2000s there were so many conversations about bringing politics into poetry. And those conversations felt especially awkward among white poets. Like they were desperate to be political in their poems, to make a difference with their poems, to be activists through their identity as a poet. Personally, I found those poems didn’t succeed in their politics. Their rhetoric was reaching for a connection between the personal and the political. Even trying to read them only as political speech wasn’t all that ineresting. They felt shallow and only mildly invested in their subject.
Political poems are so much better in the 2020s! They’re in-a-good-way weird. Or more direct. Or more resourceful. They are bewildered by our current politics and what might have led to them. If political poems in the 2000s were the juvenalia of 21st Century American political poems, then political poems in the 2020s are the sophisticated work of a middle-age poet.
Bennett’s “America Will Be” is political. And it’s personal. Its frame is an adult son talking with his father about growing up as a black man in America. “He was born in the throat / of Jim Crow Alabama.” And so what was the hardest thing about going to school back then? The son asks his father. And it’s how the poet communicates what he expects to hear versus what his father actually tells him that is where the magic in the poem starts for me.
His father remembers how lonely he was. He was taunted and isolated. And the poem is clear how surprised the poet is to think about America in that light. To see his father’s loneliness as a part of American history. “You say democracy / & I see the men holding documents that sent him off / to war a year later.” The politics of this poem are so clear. America has been shit for a long time. It was in Jim Crow Alabama. It was when it drafted men to serve in a war. And it was during out last President, “lauding a wall big enough to box out an entire world.” But amidst America’s shit, there is the poet’s father dancing in a basement with the woman he would eventually marry. America is shit. And it’s where we experience the miracles of life. It’s the poet’s avowed cynicism against “the quiet / power of Sam Cooke singing.” In the 2020s, it’s not surprising to think of the political outrage America inspires. And I suppose I like a political poem that elaborates on why outrage might be unavoidable and justified while also showing how our political life is not just a vent for sustained outrage.
Helpful Links
Joshua Bennett’s Home Page – Bennett write more than just poems! He’s a critic and a speculative fiction writer. OMG!