Dictators: Beware! Fear the Poet.

by Neal Whitman Poetry Prof

Consider the back page of the January-February 2009 American Poetry Review, a passage from a commencement address by the late poet, Stanley Kunitz.

The writer today, said Albert Camus in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize, cannot serve those who make history; he must serve those who are subject to it.?

Last month, I professed my confidence that common readers can come to this website with no fear. This month, sitting at my laptop wearing a Whittier College mascot Fear the Poet? ball cap, I hereby warn dictators otherwise.  Poets are dangerous… and say so! Stalin in 1938, for all his power, feared the poet. He put Osip Mandelstam in a correction? camp where he died. One poem, Stalin Epigram,? was, perhaps, his sixteen-line death sentence. In an eponymous poem, David Young imagined the voice of Mandelstams poet-wife, Nadezhda,

But listen, Osip
the Jokes on them. Poems survive.

Consider Baptist minister 1860 Robert Lowry’s hymn:

When tyrants tremble in their fear
And hear the death knell ringing.
How can I keep from singing?
In prison cell and dungeon vile
Our thoughts to them are winging|
How can I keep from singing?

Fast forward 140 years.

Consider Leonard Cohen’s 2006 poem Anthem:

…killers in high places
say their prayers out loud.
But theyve summoned, theyve summoned up
A thundercloud
And theyre going to hear from me.

Uruguayan Eduardo Galeano warned in his poem, The Nobodies, that shooting them would be of no use. One nobody, a friend of Galeano who spent years in prison, was allowed a weekly visit from his five-year old daughter. Each week, she would bring a crayon drawing for him, but each was confiscated: No pictures of people. No pictures of houses.? No pictures of birds.? One week the prison guard grudgingly let in a picture of a grove of trees. Her father admired the drawing and asked about the little circles in the branches: Are those lemons? Shhh! she whispered. Be quiet, Daddy. Those are the eyes of birds. Theyre hiding.

Galeano, himself, spent time in prison, fled Uruguay, lived in Argentina until his name ended up on a death squad list there, went to Spain, and finally returned to Uruguay when it became safe once again for writers.

Why should any authoritarian figure fear the poet?

Consider this: Poetry is a very special type of communication.

Poets start the conversation, but the reader has the last word. Dictators expect to be the first and last word. What we got here is a failure to communicate. This I profess.

Tagged as: Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof.