"Seeds of Fire" the new, Jon Andersen edited anthology from Smokestack Books is the best collection of political poetry since Lowenfels' "Poets of Today" (1965).
The hefty compendium collects over 50 current U.S. poets, some famous, some, for the moment anyway, unknown. Of the many excellent poems and poets, I've chosen to excerpt the following four.
Doug Anderson's vignette, "Bamboo Bridge," depicts a frozen moment, a time out of war, in which a group of exhausted soldiers come upon a young woman bathing in a stream. All the propaganda, blood and mud melt away in this single Edenic moment. Then the girl sees them watching her and they see the hatred in her eyes. "Reality" reasserts itself, they pass through her village and back into the nameless, endless war.
Jim Daniels' narrative, "The Sound of It," describes life, love and sexual awakening within the constrained circumstances and close quarters of a hard scrabble working class community. His parents' love-making, euphemistically explained as "back rubs", take place in an obviously cramped house with the television turned up. The narrator relates his own romantic life, an engagement, a ring bought for $300.00 and sold back for $50.00 after the couple break up. (The jeweler explains they'll melt down the gold, reuse the diamond). Segueing to the present, he tells of his mother's back trouble, the steel brace she wears, his own work related back injury (The doctor asks him to "Rank your pain on a scale of one to ten"). He still sees his ex-fiancee (no one escapes), both are middle-aged. "She had beautiful breasts, though I'm not sure I ever told her so." His parents are still together and he recalls seeing them, holding hands, walking toward a waterfall, "the sound of it drowned out everything".
Amy Groshek's "Paying the Bills" opens with the struggle of a cow (#49) to escape the slaughterhouse to which her father is attempting to deliver her. Both man and animal are described as caught in a life and death battle. "Who is more stubborn, more animal?" A year later, the dispossessed farmer finds himself once again engaged in another battle, only now it's he who is being dragged by circumstance to a slaughterhouse life of cities and factory work, "torn by his heels from his earth."
The poet returns at the close to the image of cow and man involved in a "Homeric" mythological duel, which, despite all circumstance, ennobles them.
There are many poems of this calibre and power, which, in their mainly understated, metaphoric way, create a damning portrait of unbridled capitalism without ever descending to hectoring agit-prop rant.
For example, Luis Rodriguez' masterly "Carrying My Tools." Again, the form is conversational, seemingly mundane – "Any good craftsman carries his tools." The poet continues, describing how he always kept his tools well cared for, at the ready. Clawhammers, wrenches, screwdrivers, taps and dies, "cherished like a fine car, a bottle of rare wine or a moment of truth...without tools, what kind of person could I be?" At the poem's close, he confesses he's traded the tools of manual labor for the words and knowledge of a cultural worker. An enlightener. "So there may not be any work today/but when there is, I'll be ready/I got my tools."
That's what this book is. A toolbox. Something of use in the great tasks ahead.
--Michael Shepler is cultural coordinator of Political Affairs.
