The questions give me considerable trouble because my experiences didn't really start or end with the recent downturn that affected the middle class. I started writing political poems for publication in 1990. Most American poets had gone to sleep by this time. Most had been school trained to accept beauty, trivia and mythology as that which would flow from the barrel of an ink pen. I elected to write for the underground and focus on truth, politics, social justice and similar topics.
The current recession just drives home to me that most Americans don't know what happened to political poetry. They don't know that Ed Guest was the last major political poet in the major newspapers. The don't realize that advertisers worked to get the political poetry out of the public view. Later, they would get the political poetry out of the alternative weekly papers and so on. Eventually, it would become nearly extinct to the popular culture masses. Each year after 2000 though as more poetry editors found themselves excluded from participation in the economic system—the poetry doors of inclusion started to open. They would publish more and more serious issue poems and give them equal billing in the small presses alongside the aforementioned trivia, beauty and mythology.
PLEASE SHARE A POEM(S) ADDRESSING YOUR GREAT RECESSION EXPERIENCE:
Birth of a Political Poet
I read the MFA candidates
lemon drop dahlia, and baby
duck petunia poetry, and praised
those Lasik surgeons enhancing
the illusion goggle worldview
of so many renowned ‘writers,’
but somehow in all of this pulp, I
found the moneychangers mirage
starting a bardly itch amongst
molecules of my own interatomic,
ink pen bonds, flowing for truth
ABOUT THE POET:
David S. Pointer was the son of a piano playing bank robber who died when David was 3 years old. David later served in the Marine military police.
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