The people are becoming increasingly divided and misinformed. A report from the World Economic Forum in January 2024 identified misinformation and deception as the “most severe global risk expected over the next two year”.
It predicted that “perceptions about reality will also likely become polarised”, and that unrest caused by unreliable news could lead to “violent demonstrations, hate crimes, civil confrontations and terrorism”. It is widely agreed that we need to do something about the growing divides between us.
This is not a matter of different facts. It is a lack of empathy and the ability to see beyond our own experience.
Research suggests that Social Media is increasingly enclosing users in their own interests.
We are trapped in an echo chamber where we see our own values, experiences and desires as the norm.
Reading poetry, on the other hand, can help people see things in a new light by inspiring them to think beyond their experience.
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Poetry has always had a political bent. Audre Lorde , a civil rights activist and writer, said that poetry is “a revelatory distillation experience”. By distilling the essence of an experience, poets can reveal truths about life.
Lorde’s poem Afterimages(1981) records her memories of turning 21 the same year as Emmett Till, a 14-year old boy from Mississippi was lynched. The poem’s message is simple. Coming of age for black Americans means coping with the threat of extreme racial abuse.
The success of poetry often depends on showing people aspects they would otherwise ignore, repress or miss.
Some poetry plays with the form to create this revelatory effect. Estate fragments is a poem by Gavin Goodwin that explores the Bettws estate in Newport. It juxtaposes quotes from academic writing with interviews of residents, a practice known as “found poem”.
Goodwin tries to examine the impact of seemingly abstract political decisions and discussions on a specific place and community. Consider this stanza.
Inequality increases
The stakes are raised
People younger than you
were more dangerous.’
The first two lines are taken from Common Culture, a 1990 sociological study on the cultures of youth. These last two lines are taken from an interview conducted with a Bettws resident. Together, the two tell a tale: that national economic inequality makes people in a community of working-class fear each other.
Look closer and look deeper
Even more conventional lyric poems can reveal social and political realities. The North End of Winnipeg is explored in North End Love Songs by Canadian Metis Nation author katherena Vermette. Vermette spoke about the North End in a CBC interview.
My work aims to look deeper and closer at the people who are blamed and to see that they are not as they appear.
As a result of misinformation and polarisation, social tensions are created. Certain groups are blamed and generalised. Vermette’s Indians explores the destruction caused by preconceptions about people and places.
The poem describes vermette’s missing brother, who was later found in Winnipeg’s Red River. The poem focuses on Winnipeg’s police, who tells the family there is “no point in looking” because the man will come back when “he gets bored/or broken”. This conclusion is not based on an investigation but rather by reducing the brother of the speaker to stereotypes.
The family then “finds” out what happened. The speaker explains that not only did her brother drown, but also the land was “flooded/with dead Indians”. The speaker learns that the fate of her older brother is the same as many other Metis in Winnipeg. This personal loss speaks for others:
indians get drunk
We don’t know what we are doing?
Do stupid things
like being young
Like going home alone
Walking across a frozen River
Not quite frozen
Vermette relates grief with struggles against oppression and systematic apathy. Poetics is a key element of the poem’s political, social and geographical sense.
The poem’s explicitness makes it meaningfully relevant to political issues, bringing attention to the shockingly large number of people who have been found missing and are suspected to be on the Red River. It can be used to link important grassroots initiatives such as Drag The Red which seeks to “find answers” about missing loved-ones that may lie in the river.
Although North End Love Songs were published two years prior to Drag the Red, the poem as well as the initiative clearly reflect the same type of traumatic and sociopolitical events.
Newsfeeds are increasingly limiting our thinking and perception. Lorde’s statement that poetry is “not a luxury” has taken on a new meaning after 40 years. It might now be a necessity for politics.
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Alex Hubbard was formerly associated with the Labour Party and Aber Food Surplus.
