Not since the Vietnam War has there been such cause for political poetry. Today there is the carnage, chaos, corruption and obscene torture inflicted on the people of Iraq and Afghanistan by the junta in Washington.

And everyone knows of the genocidal slaughter and brutal destruction wreaked on Palestinians by the regime in Jerusalem. Shamefully, there is also the supine acquiescence in these horrors by the neoconservative government in London.

Poets might also write about the world-wide violence waged by religious fanatics of Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Hinduism. Worst of all is mankind’s accelerated destruction of the flora, fauna, water, air and light of this planet.

Can political poetry do any good? Despite having cynically declared that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’, Auden continued to write resonant political poems. The motivation for such poetry is evident, but here is how Pablo Neruda explained it in 1937 in ‘Spain in Our Hearts’:

You will ask: And where are the lilacs?
And the metaphysical blanket of poppies?
And the rain that often struck
your words filling them
with holes and birds?
...
You will ask: Why does your poetry
not speak to us of sleep, of the leaves,
of the great volcanoes of your native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets,
come and see
the blood in the streets,
come and see the blood
in the streets!

A quarter of a century later, and shortly before his death, Neruda’s voice remained fierce. His final book of poetry was A Call for the Destruction of Nixon and Praise for the Chilean Revolution. Attacking that infamous President for his genocidal bombing of Vietnam, Neruda said:

We are piercing Nixon, the mad,
with one clear stanza and a well-aimed heart

Thus I have concluded that Nixon should fall
by a harsh and just volley of shots:
I have filled my cartridge belt with tercets.

Why do we not write more political poetry? One of the reasons is that it’s particularly demanding — the difficulty of creating work that is never less than poetry, while avoiding the clichés of journalism, propaganda and rant. The poem’s power must come out of memorable images and language comparable to that of, say, elegies and love poems. Why write it? To provide antidotes to the spin excreted by the White House, Downing Street and media. And because the poet feels it is necessary.

Political poetry is indeed being produced. Last year Todd Swift edited an anthology for Salt Publishing, 100 Poets Against the War (the current one in Iraq). The book grew out of Swift’s website, www.Nthposition.com. In February that year the editors of Poetry London, with Carol Rumens, people from the Poetry School and other friends, organised a contingent of about 70 poets who marched in London under a ‘Poets for Peace’ banner to join the one and a half million people protesting against the then imminent attack on Iraq.

Political activism is often conjugate with political poetry. As Marilyn Hacker tells in her powerful portrait of Muriel Rukeyser in this issue, that courageous poet was jailed many times for her political protests. Rukeyser, with her friend, the poet Denise Levertov, even flew to North Vietnam on an unofficial peace mission while that war was raging.

Here is an excerpt from a poem written by Levertov 20 years later, titled ‘News Report, September 1991’, about the first Gulf War:

US BURIED IRAQI SOLDIERS ALIVE IN GULF WAR

‘What you saw was a
bunch of trenches with
arms sticking out.’
‘Plows mounted on
tanks. Combat earthmovers’...

‘A lot of the guys
were scared,’ he said,
‘but I
enjoyed it.’

Scott Verner, Reviews Editor