62 contemporary poetry
personal, we risk relinquishing one of the most powerful sites
of resistance. The celebration of the personal however can
indicate a myopia, an inability to see how larger structures of
the economy and the state circumscribe, if not determine, the
fragile realm of individuality. (p. 31 )Forché calls for a third term to be distinguished between ‘the
state’ and ‘the personal’ which she names ‘the social’. She adds that
the social ‘is a place of resistance and struggle where books are pub-
lished, poems read and protest disseminated’ (p. 31 ). Poetry, far
from not making anything happen politically, can be read as what
poet Michael Palmer refers to as ‘something happening among
other things happening’.^12 Cast in this light, poetry has political
agency played out in the social realm. Palmer urges the poem to
bear witness to the atrocities of the twentieth and twenty-fi rst
centuries. He comments upon the network of associations and con-
fi gurations that make the poem. His reading of poetry’s response to
‘a moment of Barbarism’ establishes the relevance of the contem-
porary poet’s ongoing engagement with society:
The poem is altered by events that it cannot possibly foresee... The point is not simply how work responds to current
events, but how previous work is altered by and alters, them
... Poetry as something happening among other things hap-
pening. As something happening in language, and to language
under siege. Poetry as memory, sometimes memory of the
future. Poetry as both fi xed and in process, ever a paradox.^13
As Palmer points out, poetry of the twentieth and twenty-fi rst
centuries has had to learn how to ethically address and represent
brutality and war, from inter-ethnic confl ict to global warfare.
Theories of deconstruction and poststructuralist thought can per-
suade readers and students that the politics of a poem lies in an
interrogation of linguistic structures. Given these differences, we
will need to address the distinctions between a poetry which writes
about politics, and a poetry which performs politically. World War
II veteran and pacifi st Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s manifesto poem
Insurgent Art ( 2007 ) offers a belief that poetry has political agency.