In my poetry travels, I often quote Audre Lorde’s claim, “Poetry is not a luxury.”

If not a luxury, it follows then that poetry is a necessity. But how and in what ways is that true? When I teach, I speak about the “supra-literary” intentions of poetry—poets creating art that refuses to stay still on the page, that wants to stretch itself and do something in the world. Like other arts, poetry is an act of attention: it asks us first to look at and then to look through what we encounter in our world—to see it differently. Seeing differently, of course, is the first step toward change; a new understanding can lead to new action. Today, more than ever, we need poetry in its role as an agent of change.

Seamus Heaney has suggested poetry is “a joy in being a process for language” and an “agent for proclaiming and correcting injustices.” In her poem “Savings,” Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan writes, “This is the truth, not just a poem.” She also writes, “This is a poem, not just the truth.”  For me, poetry is both “affective” and “effective”: aesthetically pleasing and simultaneously doing something in the world.

I periodically teach a graduate poetry craft and theory seminar called “The Poetics of Spirit, Witness, and Social Justice.” On the simplest level, the work we read and the work the students write in that class casts new light on conditions and experiences of our world. They require us to re-see everything from history to nature, education to politics, and to revise—not just the poems we may have drafted in our notebooks, but our very understanding about spirit, language, privilege, and power.

I grew up on the White Earth Reservation with my inheritance one part Indigenous wisdom, one part a legacy of violence and unjust treatment at the hands of the U.S. government. Somewhat naturally, then, for me activism and poetry have always been wedded. The work I do as a writer is a vital part of a life lived leaning toward an other light; it hearkens toward a different vision of how to be in the world. Humbly, as I place myself among those who seek justice, equality, a sustainable relationship to our planet—who seek change—I hold up my own small lamp of assembled words and images.

But poetic activism is not merely opposition—it is the work of sustaining spirit and community building. Indeed, I began writing poetry seriously when I was traveling with Winona LaDuke and Gordon Henry to raise money for the White Earth Land Recovery Project. At different times over the years, I have been a part of writing groups, participated in various publication projects, and belonged to formal or informal art communities—Word Warriors, Poets Against the War, Crow Commons, etc. In line with this notion of community building, activism can also mean providing basic access. Much of the work I do as a teacher, much of what I did as Wisconsin Poet Laureate, is simply this—sharing poetry with diverse groups of people and giving them the opportunity to share their work and their ideas as well.

The re-seeing poetry encourages, the spiritual nourishment it provides, and the communities it can build, all circle us back to thinking about tangible ways poetry sustains us. In classes, I have used Carolyn Forchè’s volume Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness as a text to show the longstanding use of poetry in confronting extreme conditions like war, poverty, and injustice in different eras and many different parts of the world. Poets exposing the stories may prevent future atrocities. Naming the truth of history also heals.

In my own travels, I have met and performed with poets in various regions of the world, including Bahrain and Indonesia, and yes, poetry of witness, poetry of resistance, poetry for change is flourishing around the globe. But precisely because poetry raises awareness, there are also attempts to silence the voices of writers, artists, and other agents for change. I know individuals who have suffered at the hands of repressive governments. To me, the fear that fuels such repression merely reinforces my belief in the power of literature to teach, to incite change.

Find yourself alone in someone else’s house, nine thousand feet above your actual life, days hemmed mostly in by national forest and the wind of your own thoughts.

(He says he will die young. He says he is old. He says touch, turned take.)

Here, there is nothing to do but walk around the pastures, up mountains, along your own fence-lines. Feed the dogs in your care. Feed the feral cat, you name him Jasper, that keeps the rodents down.

(He says he is only a child. He says he was never a child. He says split. Ache.)

Coyotes sound in the night. Hear it as promise or warning; either way, hear it as a signal somehow for you. Awaken: the ridges lost in what you try to call fog, that’s what you know it as, but the name won’t stick.

(He says he is strong. He says he is naked. He says monster, innocent.)

You’re trying hard to understand love, how it can pour out of broken things. You try to understand broken, hear it as a lullaby—

Hush little baby don’t say a word

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press 2016 Poetry Month Contest. We received many outstanding entries, from which these pieces by Jessica Jacobs, Olajide Timilehin Abiodun, and Catherine Chen stood out. We hope you’ll enjoy them as much as we did.

It’s 10 p.m. Do you know whereyour children are? Well, there I was

with the remote, my thumb a die punch,a jackhammer’s relentless up and down

through a world of possiblelives—America’s Most Wanted, Nick

at Night, To Catch a Predator—in searchof prey worth pausing for. I slowed,

though, not for shows but for theirinterruptions: Bare shoulders. Wet neck. Rope

of hair glistening beneath a glisteningstream. Prell. Breck. So many ways to

get your hair glossy. So much skinjust off-screen

I tried to keep myself from wantingto see. I rapped my wrist

with the remote; pinched the undersideof my thighs, behind

my knees—a child’s small-fingered self-flagellation. I knew

only enough to know I should not wantthis. So I called myself names, donned

shame as my hair shirt. Though Inever once turned it off. Or looked away.

Fountain pens are expensive

Only a kobo lays in my pocket

Script-let books are scarce

I couldn’t found none

Internet is a necessity

I have no gadgets

The four legs of my table are ill

The carpenter storms with bill

Art needs audience

No one will listen to me

Busy are days

Time is rob by minutes

It left me only a minute of pace

to pour my world out on paper

Paragraphs are sans coherence

Sentences are hard to come by

Lines are porous

lacking the wit of poets

Even words are stiff

Like a drained-up river

They spring forth no water

Ideas seize to flow like rivulets

The muse proves stubborn

she only keeps silent in sober

Out of the reach of her master

I’m no poet.

There is a red brick wall at the very end of the street. You relieve it of form and enter the hole that remains. Infinity is here. Only in persistence can your body adjust to the conditions of precarity. Are you willing to tread past the point of identity? Take this sign. Die, then struggle. I ask you, “Where will you go from here?” What the hole of history obscures is the degree to which we have trained ourselves to live under the hypnosis of mythology. The hole has the circumference of a quarter but that is our approximation and the hole itself has no conception of currency. A quarter’s circumference is a dollop of honey is a rose is the imprint my index finger leaves on packaged meat at the supermarket. Say the things you could not tell your mother the night you realized her desires were born of her failure. Say her name. Say “Black Lives Matter.” That life continues today is no small achievement. Even as devastation lies with them in bed, the lovers’ bodies know how to derive pleasure from the fractal formations of the chandelier’s crystal blue lights: sunrise. I use dangerous language to distinguish myself. Keep treading. Use tools inaccessible to technology, like topographical memory or an archive of self-erasure or illegibility. Drones have been useful in mitigating the abscess that outlines the hole of history. Expansion, contraction. With every gasp and kiss, the lovers inhale the toxic fumes of another air strike. You too consume these chemicals. You too do not stop taking up space.

We are delighted to present this week’s selections from the Brain Mill Press 2017 Poetry Month Contest. We received many outstanding entries, from which this piece by Topaz Winters stood out. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we did.

Constructing ‘a Plausible Protagonist’

Riding home double, atop the handlebars, a dangling leg
catches spokes. Like the ticker-tape sounds
of cards flapping, like the sudden violence

done to childhood when you trust too much.

After, I remember
how we’d beg to skip church if
we went to Sunday school, if
we helped with the baby, if
we’d mow that afternoon, and the permission once given

felt like the hill rising up out of the ditch after
crossing the highway and before we walked
the half-mile home together in quiet, between
the treeline and the houses.

But, we were riding a bike & here we are walking.

And the point of this is an entirely conventional story, subtitled
“Virtue Rewarded” or “Vice Punished,” as all stories
could be subtitled. Once when retelling

the story of the bike accident, how the bike became airborne, spiraling
over me, and the soft landing of pine needles and sugar sand, I remembered
the boy jokes you’d tell me; where the punchline
always referenced my self and my kin.

Depression may be just a poorly told tale. And when I went down

into the needles & sand, you arced
over me, the back half of the bike propelled you so far forward –
and we were only lucky that no one was worse hurt, no splintered bone, no

speeding back to church to rouse the parents from the sermon, the slumber, the complacence,

to sound the alarm. When I tell the story now, all I remember is that I loved you,
and then later, I didn’t. In the sandbox
we’d spend summer hours building canals and tunnels and bridges
and running the garden hose, creating worlds beyond any of today’s simulations;

the time we found a bag of cement in the barn & decided to make it all permanent

and after transplanting minnows and crawfish from the river, we came back

the next morning and they were all dead. I sort my poems into piles, and this pile is called:
Poems Only To Be Read To Strangers.

Reprinted from All Beautiful & Useless (BlazeVOX, 2015).