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In
Main St Rag’s blistering poetry anthology “Wag the Dog: Poems of Politics
and Social Justice,” New England voices contribute to a national chorus.
The collection’s greatest strength is the range of ways its poets experience
political life. Along the way they confront encroaching authoritarianism, the
military-industrial complex, the oligarchy and income inequality, and the
erosion of access to health care, among other issues. The poems also display a
warm immediacy; they move between public events and inner voices—through
kitchens, medical appointments, offices, gardens, American history and personal
memory. Some demand an honest appraisal of what one citizen’s vote can do in
the face of this national peril, while others hint that saplings will live to
outgrow the pines and oaks with their ominous institutional shadows.
Massachusetts
poet Carla Schwartz, who recently won the New England Poetry Club’s Samuel Washington
Allen Prize for her elegy to the late Charles Coe, told me that a local poetry
group inspired her to write a political poem that remained positive. Her poem
“Today I Started to Write About America” begins in uncertainty:
“Whose
America might
I
have written anyhow?”
…
“An
America, with all its chest-puffing
missile-might,
its misspent dotage
that
brings me shame?”
Many
of us have peered out the window on a winter day, wondering if we’re naïve to
have believed in ideals, American or otherwise. In the poem, Schwartz calls
forth the extended metaphor of a sapling in this winter landscape. The personified
tree contains a “dormant” energy, ready to burst forth. The poet wonders what
she might utter, in her “huddled” and “hunched” state:
“waiting
to burst out
from
under a heavy thumb,
to
spring back
in
release?”
Maine
poet John Seksay provides a similarly striking image in his poem “Shortened
Fuse” as he envisions the Statue of Liberty repulsed by America’s failure to welcome
the “tired,” the “poor,” and the “huddled masses” invoked by Emma Lazarus’s
poem inscribed on a plaque inside the statue’s pedestal.
“Lady
Liberty has been quite loudly
tapping
her massive copper sandal
in
frustration, fists planted on her hips,
sputtering
torch clenched tight in her right fist,”
Seksay
offers this powerful thought while questioning our nation’s descent into
demagoguery, having fallen for a narcissist who uses his executive office to
unjustly enrich himself through digital-asset ventures.[1]
By the end of the poem, Seksay imagines our national monument transformed into
an exasperated woman tapping her foot and contemplating departure.
“When
so many people fall for a scamming man
who
can’t bear to see any true image of himself
then
America may have completely lost its chance.
Lady
Liberty just might book a boat for France.”
Amherst
poet Gerald Yelle brings an even darker absurdity to the fore, shining a light
on the institutional drudgery that trickles into our day-to-day lives. “I think
it’s important to protest against the current regime,” he told me. Although
typically leery of themed anthologies, he had poems that fit. His “Mapped to a
Tractor Beam Shadow,” originally inspired by Gandhi and The Jewel in the Crown,
found relevance.
The
poem stages an argument between a museum patron and a docent over a
disappointing display and the politics of its funding. Neither quite emerges
innocent from the exchange, and there is a sense that their opposition is
arbitrary. The patron’s generosity carries the threat of control; the docent
knowingly makes a false accusation. In sophist fashion to make Gorgias blush,
he trusts repetition to make it stick:
“He
knows if he says it
over
and over at the right
volume
with just the right pitch
and
intonation she’s bound to believe.”
In
Yelle’s “They Said Resistance Was Futile,” the poet effortlessly enacts a state
of political acquiescence:
“It
seemed
waiting
was the right thing to do when
the
shooting stopped, but then our neighbors
started
disappearing. The people in charge kept
changing
the subject. We kept hoping
they’d
declare victory and leave us alone.”
New
Hampshire native Veronica Tucker’s poems “County Line” and “Narcan Weather” paint
scenes that demonstrate what happens when institutional priorities envelop
human concerns. The opening line of the former communicates so much: “The map
still shows a hospital here.” But “No camera crew arrives,” the poet relays, as
the community loses vital services:
Each
year another service disappears
the
way shoreline disappears
one
storm at a time.
In the poignant “Narcan Weather,”
Tucker shows how trauma can hang over daily life even on a day when nothing out
of the ordinary happens. We see this in the naloxone a grandmother carries in
her purse next to peppermints, a rosary, and a boy’s photograph. As the
medication expires, she waves to neighbors and waters tomatoes because ordinary
routines must coexist with her fears; at their best they may soothe them.
Cambridge’s Scott Ruescher often
finds inspiration through traveling. In “At the Dockery Plantation,” he tells
of an essential pilgrimage to one of the places where the roots of modern
popular music took hold. He explained:
“My contribution to Wag the Dog, “At the Dockery
Plantation,” is one of many poems I’ve set in the American South. A few new
ones, this one included, are set at sites along the Blues Trail in Mississippi.
The Dockery Plantation, as my poem suggests, was the home and workplace of
several well-known blues musicians during the Jim Crow days—musical artists
whose work informed the creations of most of the white musicians I grew up
listening to, from the Gershwins to the Rolling Stones. In writing poems about
Muddy Waters, B.B. King, Bessie Smith, and others, I guess I’m apologizing for
the financial exploitation—but I still love to listen to Bob Dylan adapt the
rhythm and blues to his Beat surrealism.”
Ruescher’s
lyrical lines have a cascading internal music, a trademark of his style:
I tried to
hear them crooning from a century or so away---
medleys of
Delta reveries about the effort to make a buck,
…
Their friends
were dancing barefoot in the grass, or lounging
by moonlight
on blankets, exorcising the demons
their
forebears hadn’t known how to offer their freedom,
swilling from
jars a corn whiskey that might have made
a mule smile,
redeemed by the blues, happy in a different way
than they’d be
singing gospel in the church the next day.
Here is
working-class resilience personified. African-American laborers living under
Jim Crow helped create the musical language through which generations continue
to express themselves. These laborers’ achievement brings me back to Schwartz’s
sapling and its latent power beneath a “heavy thumb.” This is the inherent
force that, if our country has any chance to live up to Lady Liberty’s ideals,
we must see nurtured to its full expression.
What makes this anthology special is
the dynamic range of voices and experiences. In these pages you’ll find a poem
lamenting American taxpayers’ complicity in the genocidal destruction of Gaza alongside
a professor’s testimony that a group of protestors had yelled “Go back to
Europe!” outside her classroom window, directing their prejudice at any Jewish
person within earshot. I don’t consider myself a proponent of the idea of
“required reading,” but I’ll say this: put Wag the Dog (Main St Rag,
2026) in a time capsule and you’ll give future generations a fantastic snapshot
of life in America circa the 2026 midterms. Or, just read it now as we’re
living it.
New England
Poets’ Recommendations:
Carla Schwartz
From Wag the
Dog: Malaika King Albrecht’s “Palestine Sunbird”; Tina Barry’s “Words
Disappear Too.”
Recommended
reading: Wendy Drexler’s Harvest of What Remains.
Gerald Yelle
From Wag the
Dog: Malaika King Albrecht’s “May You Live”; Dia Calhoun’s “A Bestiary of
Wind: The State of the Union February 2024”; M. Scott Douglass’s “More Faith in
the System Than I Have”; Kristin Laurel’s “Don’t Play Dead.”
Recommended
reading: An untitled manuscript by Ernie Brill, author of Journeys of Voices
and Choices.
John Seksay
Recommended
reading: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence.”
Scott Ruescher
From Wag the
Dog: Jan Beatty’s “Dropping Blotter Acid at the Slag Dump”; Linda Culp
Holmes’s “Legacy”; Jeannine Marie Pitas’s “Work”; Janette Schafer’s “Driving
Home”; Tony Medina’s “American Sonnet for Renee Nicole Good”; Jason
Youngclaus’s “Never Poets.”
Recommended
reading: Roque Dalton’s Las Historias Prohibidas del Pulgarcito.
Jason
Youngclaus
Recommended
reading: Philip Levine, “Names of the Lost.”
Jason Youngclaus
is the author of Little Planet Raisins (Spartan Press/Luchador, 2020).
His recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Burningword Literary
Journal, JMWW, Anti-Heroin Chic, Pictura Journal, The Argyle Literary Magazine,
and Jerry Jazz Musician, among others, and has been nominated for a
Pushcart Prize. He lives in New England’s Merrimack Valley. His poem “Never
Poets” also appears in Wag the Dog.
jasonyoungclaus.com
| Instagram: @jyc_music_lyrics
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