76 contemporary poetry
Bernstein candidly recognises that ‘it is almost a joke to speak
of poetry and national affairs’.^44 Evoking Rousseau’s The Social
Contract he affi rms that ‘Poetry is one of the few areas where the
right of reconvening is exercised.’^45 We can begin to understand
the relationship between poetry and politics in Bernstein’s lan-
guage, writing not as protest poetry, but as a poetry that wishes to
transform patterns of reading and assessing the world. The poet
refers to this impetus as:
Poets don’t have to be read, any more than trees have to be sat
under, to transform poisonous societal emissions into some-
thing that can be breathed. As a poet, you affect the public
sphere with each reader, with the fact of the poem, and by
exercising our prerogative to choose what collective forms
you will legitimate. The political power of poetry is not meas-
ured in numbers; it instructs us to count differently.^46Bernstein’s claims for poetry as enacting change enforces that it is
a revolution in reading and understanding.
REPORTING WAR: ELIOT WEINBERGER
In a column for Poetry in 2008 David Orr considers how a poem
may perform politically. He questions whether the political in
poetry must be subdivided into categories of responsiveness to
ideas of social relations, world events, reportage, language – even
the ability of the poem to incite action:
Is a political poem simply a poem with ‘political’ words in
it, like ‘Congress’ or ‘Dachau’ or ‘egalitarianism’? Or is it a
poem that discusses the way people relate (or might relate) to
one another? If that’s the case, are love poems political? What
about poems in dialect? Should we draw a fi rm line, and say
that a political poem has to have some actual political effect?
Should it attempt to persuade us in the way most ‘normal’
political speech does?... One of the problems with political
poetry, then, is that like all speech, it exists at the mercy of