rise up like Egypt? [by Vijay Seshadri]

I wasn't going to succumb to the temptation to editorialize when I accepted David's kind invitation to blog for Best American Poetry this week. The opposite of poetry isn't abstract thought but it is editorializing, and the opinions of poets are dubious mostly because, consciously or unconsciously, they've trained their minds in an antithetical direction. Unfortunately, I can't resist. A lot of people, including many of the demonstrators themselves and sympathizers such as me, were amazed that the sit-ins in Madison were likened, however fugitively, to what happened in Egypt. I recently heard of a perfectly ordinary academic dispute between faculty and administration at a college that, in turn, was being likened to what happened in Madison. And I woke up yesterday to the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka seriously invoking the condition of working families devastated by the current economy to express solidarity with the NFL's players union (which is why I'm writing this). The larger issue of union-busting aside, is this recourse to similitude, to metaphoric thinking, to hyperbole (a trope poets are particularly partial to), to all those poetic devices that bridge the real and the imaginary politically useful? Or can poetry be politically useful when it is used to create identities where none exist? I'd say no, and I wish there was more rhetorical discipline in the public discourse, for no other reason than to lessen my aesthetic aggravation. And, besides, for metaphors to be useful politically, they have to be too simple to be safe. About his tyrant, Auden says, "and the poetry he invented was easy to understand."

 http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15548