Alissa Quart Applauds Poetry and Political Rhetoric's Intermingling

In a piece published in the New York Times's Op-Ed pages, Alissa Quart draws readers' attention to Elizabeth Warren's director of surrogates and strategic communications, poet Camonghne Felix, before zooming out to examine the larger landscape of poets whose work documents, questions, reframes, and critiques political narratives. "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," Quart writes. Picking up there: 

Should we be surprised about a link between the highest levels of our political world and our most acclaimed poetry? I don’t think so — and I think we should get ready for more of it, because it’s coming and we need it, desperately. Political rhetoric can be so mangled these days, as President Trump and his cronies alter our language for the worse, renaming white nationalists “the alt-right” and calling journalism “fake news.“

And there is still the longstanding problem of the apparatchiks who repeat the rote colorless verbiage (“the American people,” for one) within our political sphere. The effect is of air trapped in a room where the windows are closed. We are being failed in so many ways, even with the language we communicate in, and by the predictable ways those in power can use and abuse it.

Ms. Felix and other poets like her are intertwining politics, public life and poetry to create works that vaunt over conventional language and avoid phrases that have lost meaning through overuse. This seems to make her a good fit to work for Senator Warren, who in her 2014 autobiography drew on poetic language and deployed melodious techniques of repetition. (“And there’s my mother. She is in her slip and her stocking feet and she is saying, ‘We will not lose this house. We will not lose this house. We will not lose this house.’”)

Continue reading at the New York Times.