Dazed Asked Poets to Share Their Favorite Political Poems

For World Poetry Day (which was yesterday, if you weren't aware), Fatimah Asghar, Inua Ellams, Sophie Robinson and eight more poets discussed "what makes poetry political for them," as Katie Goh writes for Dazed, and to share their favorite political poems. Robinson's picks:

Sophie Robinson: “Poetry is political, at its best, because it can make the impossible possible and reveal the current order as a contingency, an option. Unlike narrative fiction, journalism, or most other kinds of writing, lyric poetry removes the need for story and character. What we have is speech transcending time and space, desire transcending subjectivity. 

“What a good poem fosters is an intimacy between the ‘I’ of the poem and the reader that has always seemed to me like a necessarily queer intimacy; it’s a form of intimacy that isn’t contained by traditional categories of affection and creates a wormhole in our ego’s need to separate ourselves out from each other and the world. When I read a poem, I become the voice that’s speaking to me, because I am adopting that voice’s perspective on the world, I am speaking their language as I read the poem to myself, out loud or in my head. Strange voices, rhythms, and images force me to confront and transgress the hard limits of my body and my world view.”

What are your favourite political poems?

Jameson Fitzpatrick, “I Woke Up”

Eileen Myles, “I always put my pussy”

Amiri Baraka, “Why’s/Wise”

Frank O’Hara, “Having a Coke With You”

Sophie Robinson's third collection, Rabbit, is out now.

Read more at Dazed.