By Michael Brosnan
I set up this blog with the intention of posting here more often. But I find myself focusing more on my poetry writing this year — finishing up my fourth book for release in early 2026, while thinking ahead to the next book. There’s not much in this process that is worth sharing in a blog like this, so I tend to stay quiet. In years past, I would have spent more time writing about our collective efforts at educating the young well — for both the self-actualization of each child and the long-term health of society. In particular, I would look for ways to improve our collective efforts at diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice in our schools so that all children are offered quality education and highly supportive, engaging communities. I still believe in this work, of course, and I’m sure I’ll get back to it with renewed energy at some point. I guess I find I just can’t pull away from poetry at the moment.
It some ways, this attention to poetry feels a bit odd. As so many people tell me, poetry doesn’t seem to matter to most Americans. At least it’s clear that few people read it. I sometimes joke that there are more people writing poetry than reading it. Though that may not actually be a joke. Some friends tell me — as a way to be supportive, I suppose — that they try reading poetry but just don’t understand it. While those who buy and read my books say they “enjoy” reading my poetry, the sales of my books make it clear that, in terms of influence, in terms of touching lives in ways I hope matter, it seems my poetry has little impact.
There’s also the question of the value of spending one’s time on poetry when our nation is in such political upheaval. While I should know better by now, I recently emailed a group of long-time friends a Facebook clip of Bill Murray reading Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “Dog” poem, accompanied by Jan Vogler on cello in front of a Paul de Vos painting “Fable of the Dog and the Dam” in the Meadow Museum on the campus of Southern Methodist University. I thought the combination of poetry, art, and music — as well as the lives of dogs — would cheer folks up and maybe turn down the pressure a bit so that we could think more broadly about, as Bill Murray put it, “being human.” One friend wrote back: “I don't get it — now we need straight down-to-earth talk — this ain’t it as far as I can tell.”
I understand the response. But I also feel that we get more than our share these days of excellent straight down-to-earth talk designed to combat the abundance of manipulative lying and fearmongering and hate speech from the political right. While this kind of talk is essential, I also believe that art, music, and poetry matter deeply — and seem to get shoved aside in times like these. And this week, in my own reading, I’ve come across a few reminders of why we shouldn’t let this happen.
The book I’m currently reading is Carolyn Forché’s What You Have Heard Is True. This is an autobiography of sorts about Forché coming of age as a poet, her political awakening, and the intersection of the two. It also serves as a call for the importance of poets as witnesses in the world. In 1978, in her mid-twenties, Forché was visited by Leonel Goméz Vides — a El Salvadorian coffee farmer, activist, and relative of friend. He encourages her to come to El Salvador with him because, as he put it, she is a poet (he has read her work) and his country needed poets to witness the injustices and suffering and write about it for all the world to see. Those who know Forché’s work know, of course, that she makes this trip and writes some seriously important poetry about human suffering in the face of deep political corruption and heartless, violent injustice. Her 1981 poetry book, The Country Between Us, contains a number of poems about her time in El Salvador. This “poetry of witness” is well-known now of course (see, for example, “The Colonel” and “The Boatman”) and in 1993, she put together what the Poetry Foundation describes as “a ground-breaking anthology” titled Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, a powerful collection of poems focused on war and injustice around the world. In the book’s introduction, Forché essentially calls for the blending of the personal and social in poetry — and, more generally, in art — as a means to help us better understand who we are individually and collectively, and to raise our spiritual and moral connections, with the goal of a more just, verdant, peaceful, and prosperous world.
I’m about halfway through What You Have Heard Is True, so I can’t offer an overall view of the book. But I can say I find the writing remarkable, and the moments Forché witnesses in El Salvador truly horrifying (when it comes to corruption and violence) and moving (when it comes to the spirit of the people struggling to live lives of dignity and meaning). I’m mostly mentioning the book now because a couple passages stopped me in my reading tracks. These are passages, I think, that offer a clearer sense of what we, in America, are starting to witness with the sudden rise of an administration that feels more like a regime aimed at dismantling our democracy for personal gain and power.
Forché arrives in El Salvador before the outbreak of civil war. But as Leonel points out to her, war begins:
“…not with a major event reported in the news but with suffering barely noticed: an unjust law, a murder, a peaceful protest march attacked by police. It begins, according to Leonel, with poverty endured by many and corruption benefiting the few, with crimes unpunished, a hardening of positions, the failure of peaceful means of appeal and redress. People were disappearing now every day, taken from the streets, from their vehicles and houses at night and in the middle of the day.”
A few pages later, Leonel tells Forché about a new law decreed by the El Salvadorian government called the Law of Defense and Guaranty of Public Order. As she describes the new law:
“It prohibited rebellion, or the hosting of meetings to discuss rebellion, the encouraging of members of armed forces to disobey orders, attempts by spoken or written word to oppose the established order, and everything having to do with opposition to the present military regime. There was also a provision having to do with the national University of El Salvador, which had been placed under a special body to assume temporary responsibility for governance, given the ‘present climate of unrest and violence on the campus.’”
As a friend of Forché’s says, “This means that they can arrest anyone at any time for any reason. They have legalized their repression.”
Forché thinks about leaving El Salvador shortly after she arrives. She is not sure what she is doing there, and she misses her home and friends. But to her credit, she stays — remains open and alert and records what she witnesses in a human world that does not function as the human world should.
I’m guessing that, in reading these passages, you, too, see the connection between events in El Salvador in the 1970s and to the work, or general leanings, of the current U.S. administration. There are numerous ways, of course, that one can respond morally to such events. And I’m deeply grateful for the journalists, researchers, and commentators who write so clearly about the daily attacks on American democracy and how we can best respond. I’m grateful for the institutions of higher education that are resisting pressures to hand over their essential democratic work to a cabal of right-wing idealists hellbent on indoctrinating young Americans in their image. But in this moment, I also believe in the power of art — visual, literary, and musical — in both naming the problems present in human culture and in creating and supporting a better vision of how we can live.
The poetry doesn’t have to be political poetry, of course. A Mary Oliver poem about egrets or wild geese works, too — as does an Edna St. Vincent Millay poem about love, or a Shakespeare sonnet about growing old, or a Kay Ryan poem about a turtle, or a Billy Collins poem about a boy making a lanyard, or a Charles Simic poem about a pencil stub, or Beat-era poem about a dog free-roaming the streets. There are so many important, moving, informative poems about war and suffering, of course — from Gilgamesh and The Iliad straight down through time to the living poets writing about Gaza today. But I might argue that what matters most is what links all these poems: the free expression and the broad witnessing of life on planet Earth in all is complexity and variety.
The second reminder of the importance of poetry and art came from my morning reading of the New York Review of Books — a publication I’ve come to admire for the depth and care of the writing. This morning, I read an essay about artist Jack Whitten, who is currently having a retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (through August 2). I didn’t know about Whitten beforehand, but I found myself taking notes about his life and work and I’m planning to get down to NYC to see the show before it closes.
Whitten, a black man born in Alabama in 1939, grew up in poverty and endured a culture of deep racism and repression. As a bright, talented youth, he was offered a scholarship to the Tuskegee Institute where he thought he wanted to train to be a military doctor. But a class on target selection for bombing campaigns woke him from that dream. He literally stood up in the class and said, “What the fuck am I doing here?”
Against advice, Whitten transferred to Southern University to study art. While there, he also got involved in civil rights and once tried to organize a nonviolent protest. He said that, in organizing the protest, he was met with some much verbal and physical abuse — “the face of true evil,” as he put it — that he threw out his possessions and bought a bus ticket to New York City to start a new life.
Whitten, if you don’t his work, was a remarkable abstract painter — a truly creative and innovative artist who saw art as a spiritual and social calling. In 2017, the last year of his life, he still held tight to that energy and conviction. He wrote in his journal:
“Art is the only spiritual form that we can depend on. When politics goes amok, when organized religions become political… we can always depend on art to pull us through. We must make sure the arts will survive for the benefit of all. Support the arts without any forms of restrictions.”
I’m not the kind of person who uses bumper stickers, but if I were, I would have two. The first: “Read more poetry!” The second: “Democracy Returns 2028.”