Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Words

years ago a poet said that words held power and to wield words meant taking responsibility for how people read those words and to believe that it was the task of a writer to speak truth even if her words made people uncomfortable and so we come to a time when writers of all ilk and that means more than journalists need to write about what is happening in our country and poets with their ability to refine each word and to create metaphors and language that leaps into images have always been able to write poems that bring the truth of what is happening to the foreground

the horror of war in Randall Jarrell's poem " the death of the ball turret gunner" brings a visceral experience to any reader...a soldier who wrote of being six miles up in the turret of a plane and the turret was hit and just before that he was thinking about life...

I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.


we need our poets to write about immigrants, black americans, muslims, lgbtq
we need our poets to write about loss
we need our poets to write about hope

we need our poets to write poems so that we can feel the fear of those painted as other
we need our poets to write about the hate spewed by the alt right
we need our poets to document these times
we need our poets to have readers

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