Back in May I had the good fortune to read from my new book at Rochester’s Writers & Books (thanks to Tyler Barton) & to be in conversation with Albert Abonado about poetry and politics.

Abonado asked me about how to make poetry and politics play with each other. My thoughts in this area are very much evolving. Here’s a slice of it:

JH: “I think the art of a poem is being on time, right?

AA: Like like tell me more about that. What do you mean by this?

JH: Well, in five years that poem I just read [cursing the field office director] won’t make any sense, right? Or it’ll make less sense. Reality is constantly happening, and it’s very confusing. There’s lots of things happening. We’re constantly trying to reconstitute our mental map of the world around us and so if a poem can arrive early and help people do that and speed up [that process] then that’s great. If the poem is telling people what they already know in terms that they already know then maybe its late. And so if the poem is on time, I think it’s done what it needs to do. And it doesn’t have to then live [longer than that]. It can die, right? It can die. It can go away.

Okay, that’s the end of the interview quote. It’s not rocket science but worth repeating. Writing to the moment requires a belief in the essential particularity of that historical moment. I find myself loving more and more poets who make the attempt, even if they fail. I find myself admiring, more and more, many of the more obscure ‘bad’ political anti-war poems from the Vietnam Era, all the anti-fascist ‘propaganda’ poems of the 30s, poems about Emmett Till, or James Byrd Jr. And, hell, maybe even more poems from people like Karen Brodine or Merle Woo that embrace far less mythologized and local ‘political’ moments and movements. They did their work in their contexts. One year, a quieter year in this empire, where the echoes of its incessant violence don’t bounce back to core, these poes could be held up in a literature seminar as examples of poor or shallow writing; years later, when the present slant rhymes with the past those poems reflect, they blaze to life again.

Who knows if my new book Buffalo Free Rapid Transit is on time? It was written 2020-2023 but in a mode that more often implies its history rather than documents it (which I do elsewhere). That world still reverberates now –but how much? & how much does its language carry or amplify that reverberation? Part of the book’s proposition is to also write ahead of its time, to propose the city you want as if it were real, layered on top of the damn abandoned city you know, as if it were already there.

Anyway, you can write your own malediction and bring it to the protests in front of the ICE field office. It will be right on time.