5 Tips for Incorporating Politics Into Your Poetry
We’re told that bringing up politics will lead to discord because those beliefs are so strongly held. Or, you may have learned, as I have, that staying quiet can be safer in places where you suspect most people will disagree with you.
(Defending Diverse Voices: The Battle Against Book Bans.)
On the other hand, if we write poetry at all, why wouldn’t we write it about our beliefs?
Political poetry is a poetry self-consciously written inside of history, of politics. It responds to external events, writes Edward Hirsch in his book, A Poet’s Glossary. Such poetry requires both internal and external focus.
While politics is about relationships, lyric poetry is by definition personal, focusing on the poet’s own feelings or state of mind. Maybe no one is willing to call the poet out for writing badly about heartbreak (okay, maybe you are), but writing about politics involves risk—risk that some of our greatest American poets have been willing to take. Black intellectuals criticized Langston Hughes as “the poet-low-rate of Harlem,” while critics urged Adrienne Rich to write as “a woman rather than a dogma, a person rather than an agenda.”
The tips below concentrate on keeping your political poem actually poetic, in other words, maintaining that lyric space. All of the poem examples are from No Spare People, my new book of poems.
Make it a process of discovery
Writing on a political topic, whatever the genre, is most interesting when the reader can’t identify where the poem will end. Beginning a new poem, I keep the writing process as exploratory as I can.
This is easiest when I begin from a state of intentional confusion, which is, honestly, usually what provokes my poems, anyway. I invoke a startling image, then add others, and see where this takes me.
One approach: Try writing a litany poem, pile on specific details or images, and revise for connections. My poem “Praying inside the emergency” begins in a prayer circle and lists people and things I prayed for in my own church group. By leaning into the sheer variety of concerns we brought to light, I drew closer to the unspoken fears I felt us guarding against, especially those moments of feeling lost, powerless, or even attracted to suffering.
Unlike in the real prayer circle, the lyric space made it possible for me to name these voids.
Check out Erin Hoover’s No Spare People here:
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Locate your authority to write on a topic
I published a longer, blank-verse-inspired poem “The nineties” around the same time as Chuck Klosterman’s book of the same name. That timing was unintentional, for sure, but rather than mining popular culture, I recalled the era’s news stories and researched its politics.
I kept “The nineties” from turning into a Billy Joel song (“We Didn’t Start the Fire”) by drawing details from the perspective I had as a teenager at the time, passing current events through that speaker’s naïve privilege. Not only did this provide content details missing from Wikipedia, focusing on that subject position was part of the point, that our current turmoil was born in that seemingly easeful decade.
Other examples: “Retail requiem” leans into the glory, then the mass closure, of American department stores, and “Apartment home in Florida as failure of the imagination” (in the Cincinnati Review, but not online) visits one electricity-dark apartment after a devastating hurricane.
Where were you when it happened?
Some poems in No Spare People zoom in on a specific person during national events. In “The power of passive voice,” a speaker frets over the collective national powerlessness as a whistleblower does what she thinks is right. In “Death parade,” we’re in the pandemic, then in the Reformation, then recalling relatives who’ve lived through the Great Depression. (A second “Death parade” remembers 9/11.) “The hedge fund manager’s first wife” imagines working in the home of a future politician’s discarded wife.
While related to efforts to highlight a specific speaker, these examples are more about thinking through power, lack of power, and its effects. As you can guess, this is one of my favorite exercises.
Don’t go as far as you could—or make a big deal of it
Two poems document my experience of economic freefall through the lens of a series of failed job interviews. In “My generation is not lost but we are losing,” the speaker comes off a drinking bender following one of them: “I made outsized vows / to become necessary. I swore, again, to be good.” Hopefully, the reader notices the word choices of “become” and “swore,” and ending on a word like “good.” Subtle moves considering how angry I was at the time.
Another poem, “To be a mother in this economy,” spotlights the losses experienced by the child of that perennial job seeker. I even wrote a few lines from this poem in the airport while searching for an outlet for my phone charger, on my way back home yet again.
Make the title do the work
One morning, I caught a man in the Starbucks drive-thru looking at me, it felt, with all the ownership bestowed by the patriarchy. The Supreme Court had just obtained an abortion rights-ending supermajority, which may have been why I noticed him. His smile was almost polite, I thought. Or was it?
Places have pasts and futures. I could feel the history of segregation in Arkansas, the location of this event, where I lived as a white woman, among all the white women who enforce racial power structures and vote against bodily autonomy.
I eventually titled my poem about these exchanges of power and control “White woman.” This poem appeared in the Florida Review, but not online.
I’ve identified a few general tips for this kind of writing, arrived at after I wrote the poems. If you’re reading this, you may already be thinking about engaging with politics in your poetry, and I hope you’ll follow that impulse, as I did. Part of the challenge (and magic) of writing politics into the lyric space is that each poem seems to require a customized approach—until you “zoom out” and discover a set of practices that was there all along.