Back from break? Some poets I've read in reaction to reading: What Is Found There - Adrienne Rich

Had a hell of an end to 2020, and been horrible all month. All three people I was living with hurt each other and manipulated/took advantage of me without meaning to in most cases. It is not feeling good in its end and I pulled back almost entirely because I cannot take on the world's problems and can understand and sacrifice myself for a collective decision. I will be haunted by it.

Still, in the month I was forced to not work by the break, I mostly read poetry and about poetry. It's all based off me reading What Is Found There by Adrienne Rich - which I'm still working my way through. The book is a collection of essays about the cooperation and dedications that poetry and politics may have. I don't necessarily always agree, in fact, often in this debate I've been extremely against the idea that art is political by nature. I sometimes find myself against leisure or the Marxist take on it. Or, I pick and choose and mince words because of the way art has made itself commercial. For Rich, and especially the period of time she's writing in, poetry seizes a different space. There is no Button Poetry or maybe even more accurately, the poetry scene in places has not been seized by the slam auteur. That is slightly disdainful but only for its limitations and some portion, inspirational for a more erratic and experimental mindset to birth itself out of the de-canonized writing. A political word does not make a political action, in its base notion. It must be followed and paired by one to be itself political notions. You must be worth the composition of your words to your motions.

Rich talks more about interruptions and disrecognition of the poet - the poets praised through time only/for reasons of their close-kin-d or imprisoned under the pseudo radical notions. That latter is more where I love her words here, and find myself allowing to make that argument of some use for our art after the revolution - something done out of survival and necessity of expression before making product of it. The essay "Those two shelves, down there!" talks of Rich going into a mall and seeing only the weakest of canon represented and mass marketed books of the 80s fill the sole two back-of-the-store poetry section shelves. She finds the voices uncared for in the Nuyorican Cafe, the indigenous movement (unstated but probably affiliated to AIM) she has been watching grow the anti-violence existence in a world of violence by all she inspires herself by. Often it is experience that leads her to decide politcal systems, which is the notion of a personal poltical, and how all these stories can be dismissed in simple wave of a hand by one or all. Or, importantly so, have no way of reaching recognition due to a total obscure resistance to the act of the poetics of language in all western dominated cultures by the masses who compose it. Poetry is inaccessible no matter who in it has been subjected to the violent apparatuses of theived and colonized systems of communications.

We have more shelves now in our Barnes and Noble, our borders crossed (awful pun). Some of these moments have been archived and even can make those big box stores. There are the local affiliates too - filled with their pastel contemporary block lettering and traumatic undergoing to reveal themselves. These are not bad things to have, but have superseded to neoliberal identity rather than originated deliberately radical. I think of poems written on scraps of notepaper or recited behind a cell door to be political before I think of even the contemporaries I like. No, this isn't to praise some sort of pre-existence of the political form of writing poetry as if it has been undone. But the situation is different, for its good and bad. We don't have to turn to Pound and pretend it's good (it's bullshit and so is he). Even in my sort of unearned rush to judge slam-styles, Denez Smith has blown me away with every poem they've ever writ (as have they with anyone else in the world to be honest). There is a breadth of what is offered by reflections on our climate, and even under the capitalization of art we have a better way to access it by its disrespect to poetry's grime-state voice of proletariats, postcolonials, faggots and fuckups. I just wish them unmarketed and with intention to stay for us and no one else's enjoyment and ability to create an upward socioeconomic mobility.

I may still come to my decision of poetry not being inherently political (in the same way that not every folk band is, and most are not - an intentional dig at myself) but it doesn't mean there is not a room for an inspiration to action by the words of another. That is more what I took away and as my month, life and health have crumbled, Rich's general application of comments on existence of political being are flooring me at every page turn. Anyway, here's some of the poets I've been reading because of all this. It's a bit overwhelming, and most of them were imprisoned poets but not prisoner poets - an odd distinction from this false wobbly:

• Osip Mandelstam - Honestly every poem is beautiful and cherished. He inspired a lot of the other Russian works I've read through too and there's not much to say about it. Still moving through these, at a pace of a few a day to ruminate on.
• Irina Ratushinkaya - I really love the poems in Beyond the Limit and yet she kind of cheated herself out of an abstract after leaving the Gulag from what I can tell. A noncommie who didn't stay political, rather lived through a hell for her resistance to tankies.
• Jose Marti - I slept on him a lot and have been trying to try him out again. A copy of Simple Verses had a horribly irresponsible translation and I therefore don't know where to go to for his other poems yet since I wanted these for their destination of being anti-academic/intellectualistic. I also want to read more of his nonfic that inspired Cuba to be what it's become since I think I have a limited understanding most times to the foundations. New America is a reading I'm looking through and I need to look further behind the miscegenation argument for its limitation to understanding itself as one and my willingness to label it as such - a cultural colonialism or a fair judgement for someone dead and inspirational. Juan Gilberto Gomez came up as a name to read but I haven't seen his works in translation yet.
• Arturo Giovanitti - I've wanted to read him forever and am really attached to finding more Italian political poets. He's the working man that I need to look at but not the only one, and I wish for a better introduction to Italian socialists that aren't simply of the past - my ancestry has mostly forgotten our roots of resistance because we joined the raiders so fast and had traitors the whole way. He's a nice memory but there is a want for a continuum beyond a Parenti. Also hyper-masc.
• Irena Klepfisz - These poems, albeit some I skimmed or left to forget, were part of one of the best Rich essays in the book so far. It then served that the ones mentioned hit just as hard. 
• Caesar Vallejo - I've only started these and am finding a lot of inspiration in them. They feel similar to my own work but in a different way to how I may see myself in a way I don't with all of these poets. Sometimes the inspiration is more apt for me than anything else.
• Julio Cortazar - I am trying to read both Hopscotch and Manual for Manuel and struggling to stay on task with them but also have been seeking his poetry after reading one of his new year's day poems. The act of which made me cry buckets.
• Nazim Hikmet - I actually don't love all of these, but love the story of Hikmet that I know so far and have hung one on my wall, albeit its name forgotten to me at this writing moment. "A man sold / the bloody severed head / of his comrade." is haunting.
• Adrienne Rich / Gwendolyn Brooks - I mean I read A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far and Riot at the beginning of this all and slid through them with ease. I'd never read Riot in its entirety before and both books had been damaged by the patrons of this library, Riot, more intensely. It's fine. It's not. I used a "Bronzeville" poem (A Song in the Front Yard) from Brooks and Integrity while making magnet poetry sets for my family for Christmas. The end of this post has a poem my nana wrote with it. It's not political in the least but it is importantly personal.

I know my angels with wings bring    true love
     let patience matter          breathe life
the rainbow weaves wonderful color ribbons and sunlight
light comes with wisdom     your eyes wonder