Contemporary Poetry

politics and poetics 91

I think we’ve been using the master’s tools (to use Audre

Lorde’s powerful metaphor) to dismantle the structures that

hold us fast and that what is happening... We are beginning

to fashion new tools to do the work, because the work cannot

be done successfully using the master’s tools. The master’s

tools were developed for us out of the master’s relationship

with us... I don’t trust the archive,... the archive is much

more unstable than we originally thought.^75

NourbeSe Philip, through the disjunction and dislocation of the
text, forces the reader to create meaning; she is asking the reader
to ‘make sense’ of an event that can never be understood: ‘What
is it about? What is happening? This, I suggest, is the closest we
will ever get, some two hundred years later, to what it must have
been like for those Africans on board the Zong.’^76 She adds that
in attempting to understand these events, the reader or audience
‘shares the risk of the poet who herself risks contamination by
using the prescribed language of the law’.^77

SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS

• Following World War II, Theodor Adorno suggested that
  poetry needed to reconsider how it responded to the personal
  and the public.


• A key issue for poets after World War II was how to perform the
  role of witness and testimony.


• For many poets there is a problematic relationship between
  poetry and politics. A key suspicion would be a concern of cre-
  ating work which is merely rhetorical, or dismissed as protest
  poetry.


• One way poets have found to address the public sphere is to use
  the personal and everyday as starting points for their refl ections;
  others like Seamus Heaney and Rita Dove have used analogies
  with history and myth.


• Language use for poets like Charles Bernstein and M.
  NourbeSe Philip is a key medium for undermining prevailing
  authorities.