“The great thing about it,” I found myself explaining to my mother on the telephone last night, “is that I get to read poetry, which means I’m spending time with wonderful literature instead of just shouting slogans that I might agree with but really don’t find very interesting as language.” I was trying to account for my recent activities without sounding like a person afflicted with some sort of political St. Vitus’ dance. And it’s true. Every day, as I head for Zuccotti Park, wondering if there is really any point to my showing up there again and reading poems that may well be lost, like seeds fallen onto barren ground, in the maelstrom of chance interactions and (sometimes) frantically theatrical display surrounding the periphery of the Occupation, I have to remind myself that, arbitrary and eccentric as my devotional activity may appear, it is (at minimum) a way for me to enter into a deeper relationship with the meaningful words of others.

Ever since I started this OWS poetry experiment, I’ve been thinking about how it represents a very crude, literal way of forcing a juxtaposition between the two spheres of action that have defined my life from the time I was 20 or so: writing and political activism. Always, the two have overlapped for me–and never have I felt that they did so without acute friction. The ways of the organizer are radically different from the ways of the poet. The organizer must organize. The poet needs to loaf and invite her soul. The political thinker/writer/agitator has to communicate clearly, which means proceeding on the basis of a pretty good idea of what her words are supposed to accomplish. The poet, as Audre Lorde says (I’m paraphrasing), pulls up from the depths of the unconscious imagery and intuition that will serve in place of a “road map.” The effective political pamphlet is succinct, and lends itself to dissemination via the “people’s mic” approach. If some of its sentences get lost in transmission, still the general intention will be immediately obvious. Very often, the layers of meaning within a poem require multiple readings, or listenings, and a long mulling of context; even with all of this, the poem will tend to communicate a different range of meanings to each reader or hearer.

That said, there is a sense in which I have not, thus far, been particularly courageous in my choice of poems to read to an Occupied lower Manhattan. There are vast tracts of fascinating language that I have not chosen to represent; instead, I have selected, for the most part, overtly “political poets”–which is to say, both poets whose biographies reveal them to have been explicitly embroiled in the political currents of their times, and poets whose work speaks to that involvement. In a sense, my choices represent the tip of an iceberg whose buried portion consists of all of the secret arguments I’ve had with myself over the years about the “purpose(s)” of poetry and the ways in which political engagement (what an old-fashioned term!–time to bring it back into literary fashion) is seen either to validate or invalidate the work.

One of these days, I’m going to read Rimbaud or–goddess help us!–Yeats! (“Why should I blame her that she filled my days/with misery, or that she would of late/have taught to ignorant men most violent ways/and hurled the little streets upon the great”–isn’t that exactly what the 99% are trying to accomplish here?) Also, I’m going to read more contemporary writers. For now, though, I’m sticking to the poets who combine the potency of their language and their commitment to a life of the imagination with “something to say” to Occupy Wall Street. Today, that poet was Sterling A. Brown.
I read from The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, selected by Michael S. Harper (Triquarterly Books, 1980). On the train coming in, I’d brushed up by reading Sterling Stuckey’s introduction, which outlines the poet’s career marked by early (1930’s) acclaim and later marginalization as his work came to be regarded as somehow behind the curve in the militant 1960’s. And I’d selected a few poems that I thought would work–ones that didn’t deploy too freely the noun that our puerile society has decided it’s okay to refer to as “the N-word” (I was afraid of its resonance in the state of distraction in which passersby were likely to receive bits and pieces of my reading); and especially ones that speak to the economic and historical situation of those portions of “the 99%” descended from enslaved Africans. I read “Strange Legacies” (“One thing you left with us, Jack Johnson./One thing before they got you.”); “An Old Woman Remembers”; “Transfer” (“We can stand so much, then doan stand no mo’.”);                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             “Raise a Song”; and “Street Car Gang” (“By Gawd we do the work/What come from it is ours/We got us one more job:/This thing been messed up too long/Time to get these rails laid straight.”). Even though I sound fairly ridiculous voicing “dialect,” I also essayed a reading of “Odyssey of Big Boy” (“Lemme be wid Casey Jones,/Lemme be wid Stagolee,/Lemme be wid such like men/When Death takes hol’ on me….”).    

What surrounded me? A bustling Saturday crowd. Photographers galore. (Who says the Revolution will not be digitally depicted to a fare-thee-well?) A contingent of (mostly) young people with a banner identifying them as being from a Bronx community organization, who chanted, “We are unstoppable, another Bronx is possible!” A middle-aged man with a sign identifying him as a member of organized labor, and a button that said he is a nurse–he sat on the wall beside me, listening diligently to my reading. A young woman who stopped, asked me what I was doing, and said she had come here from Detroit (where she’s working with the Occupy Detroit effort) to visit the New York Occupation and share ideas. A college student who’s attending Wesleyan and hasn’t taken any writing courses, but wanted to hear about this poet Sterling Brown. A very tall white man in L.L. Bean-type clothing who expressed unbounded disdain–indeed, hostility–for a man with a full beard who was wearing lipstick and some sort of furry animal costume, carrying a doll, and displaying a sign that said WILL WORK FOR MONEY. (A furry companion held up a sign reading THIS IS A CIRCUS.) “You’re NOT going to get a job dressed like that!!!” the L.L. Bean wearer insisted, while the patient cops kept exhorting the crowd to move along.