Protest

Protest 

by Ella Wheeler Wilcox


To sin by silence, when we should protest,
Makes cowards out of men. The human race
Has climbed on protest. Had no voice been raised
Against injustice, ignorance and lust,
The Inquisition yet would serve the law,
And guillotines decide our least disputes.
The few who dare, must speak and speak again
To right the wrongs of many. Speech, thank God,
No vested power in this great day and land
Can gag or throttle. Press and voice may cry
Loud disapproval of existing ills,
May criticise oppression and condemn
The lawlessness of wealth-protecting laws
That let the children and child-bearers toil
To purchase ease for idle millionaires.

Therefore do I protest against the boast
Of independence in this mighty land.
Call no chain strong which holds one rusted link,
Call no land free that holds one fettered slave.
Until the manacled, slim wrists of babes
Are loosed to toss in childish sport and glee,
Until the Mother bears no burden save
The precious one beneath her heart, until
God's soil is rescued from the clutch of greed
And given back to labor, let no man
Call this the land of freedom.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox(November 5, 1850–October 30, 1919), from her 1914 book Poems of Problems (public domain | public library), written at the peak of the Women’s Suffrage movement and just as WWI was about to erupt.

Carl Sandburg: Hyacinths and Biscuits

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits. ~Carl Sandburg

At a Window
BY CARL SANDBURG

Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

What is Poetry?

The Greek word poiesis means “making.” 

• Jorge Luis Borges believed that “poetry is something that cannot be defined without oversimplifying it.  It would be like attempting to define the color yellow, love, the fall of leaves in autumn.”  
• Joseph Brodsky described poetry as “accelerated thinking."
• Seamus Heaney  called it “language in orbit.”
• Coleridge claimed that poetry equals “the best words in the best order.”
• Gertrude Stein decided, “Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns.”
• George Santayana said that “poetry is speech in which the instrument counts as well as the meaning.” 
• Paul Valery said the difference between poetry and prose is physiological.  
• Marianne Moore says it like this: 

It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,
it must be "Lit with piercing glances into the life of things";
it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

Gertrude Stein

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) decided, “Poetry is doing nothing but using losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns.”

Poetry & Memory

Poets and writers draw material from every day experience, from place, from memory and from interactions.

I gather together the dreams, fantasies, experiences that preoccupied me as a girl that stay with me and appear and reappear in different shapes and forms in all my work. Without telling everything that happened, they document all that remains most vivid. ~Bell Hooks, essayist 

The past is never dead. It’s not even past. ~William Faulkner, novelist

Certain experiences mark us, and images and memories lodge in the subconscious to emerge and re-emerge in dreams and in stories. They frame an individual's reality and filter new experience.  In poetry, another element is the body.

Paul Valery said the difference between poetry and other kinds of writing is physiological. Poetry is connected to the breath. Whether or not the poem is in formal verse, the rhythm, meter, and beat affect the lines in a poem, and these affect the reader who speaks these lines. In a poem, a reader steps into the breath of the writer for a few moments and from the writer, through the page, experiences the images, the body, and the experience. What has marked another writer is capable of marking a reader.  

Writing teacher William Zinsser said: 

Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It’s not; it’s a deliberate construction.

As a window, a photograph, and a deliberate construction, the image and poem is grounded in the body and also is a pattern of sound. It may be lyrical or not. It may be formal or not. The poet chooses words, vowels, consonants. The poet creates the energy.

I think of the poem as an instrument. It is a body with memory; a culture with a his(her)story. It has a shape with a resonant chamber, an architecture with a listening space, an ear for sound and composition. The poet deliberates on every element: the sound might be mellifluous or cacophonous. The poet makes the pauses and almost-rhymes, the length of lines and stanzas, and the arrangements and disarrangements. Along its strings or nerves, music rises in the images.  Listen. See.