Poetry is Not an Expression of the Party Line

Poetry is not easy to compose, nor is it easy to write about. Like music, poetry requires a certain immersion into the composition one hears via their ears or their eyes and assimilated inside their mind. If the ability to immerse oneself is not available for perhaps more temporal reasons, appreciating poetic and musical compositions remains a superficial exercise. The words and sound are certainly present and perhaps even absorbed into one’s memory, yet a deeper understanding remains elusive. I am opening this essay with this observation as a way to let its reader know that only a personal reading of the two poetry collections I am discussing will truly provide them with the personal and deeper meaning the poets intended. Nonetheless, I write on.

James Madigan wrote a series of letters to various US political prisoners back around the turn of the current century. These letters provide the inspiration for the title of his newly published poetry collection, Political Prisoners USA and Other Poems. They also provide a means within which the poet presents his poems and, perhaps equally important, a means for his readers to consider them. Among Madigan’s communications with those who pay and paid for their involvement in the struggle for liberation Black Panthers Geronimo Pratt, Sundiata Acoli, and Herman Wallace, MOVE members Debbie Africa and Charles Africa, and Leonard Peltier. The combined legacy of these women and men is inspiration enough for hundreds of books of poetry. Our appreciation is the least we can endeavor in honor of that legacy.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word plaintive in this manner: “Having the character of a lament; expressive of sorrow; mournful, sad.” Given that many of the poems in Madigan’s collection are responses, commentaries and reflections on the nature of humanity’s current situation—malaise, despair and uncertainty—it seems only natural that a description of these poems would include this term. Indeed, besides the poems, excerpts and comments on his exchanges with political prisoners, Madigan includes verses concerning the genocide perpetrated by Israel and the United States in Gaza, considerations of history, comments and condemnations of white supremacy. In between his lessons of history are more personal meditations on family, geography, love and Pink Floyd’s composition Atom Heart Mother. His lyric pondering the nationalist sculpture carved into the South Dakota mountain known as Mount Rushmore by the settler nation is genuine in its condemnation of that nation’s arrogance while his poem “At the Plaza” brought tears to my eyes, expressing the anger, sorrow and helplessness of those who protested (and protest) the previously mentioned genocide. Like the reviewer, Madigan’s world is one where the pursuit of power and profit is despised as much as those who have made these practices the purpose of their lives. No matter how much I want to pretend otherwise, we live in a political world (Bob Dylan sang that).

Philip Lamantia was once hailed by the surrealist Andre Breton as “a voice that rises once in a hundred years.” In 2025, City Lights republished his book Selected Poems. City Lights had previously published the collection in 1967 after his return to the Surrealist movement. The collection includes some of Lamantia’s surrealist work together with what City Lights calls his “wanderings among the Beat Generation.” The politics of surrealism go beyond the conventional. They challenge the very sense of what we conceive to be the norm—in politics and in life. They demand a world where “…the street is cleaned by the presidents of the nation” and “poet kings/are setting up/The Realm Apart.” It’s a world that celebrates life in its erotic and mindful glory all the while desiring an end to the machinery of death and the revealing of its deadly foolishness. Lamantia’s poetry celebrates lust and love, youth and old age. It reminds the reader of the sensuality of the body and the imagination of the mind; the reality of death and the temerity of birth. The poem titled “The Wheel” is a history lesson.

It begins:

At halls of Oedipus blind

at interior cairn at Garnac

at jaguar court of the Quiche flue……

then takes the reader through history in a vision unique to the poet’s eye. Another decries “The old civilization/that rolled the dice of Hitler…” to reveal another civilization “secret for six thousand years…” which features a “triangular star.” This poem is revealed to have been written from Atlantis in celebration of a new age coming forward.

Lamantia’s verse is hallucinogenic, occasionally crystalline as in a peyote vision and occasionally dissolving into puddles and ponds, like a neon waterfall cascading into the water below. It’s as if the poet’s intention is to break and then mend synapses both internal and otherwise, in the process remaking the world and our perception of it. It is also, like Madigan’s work, both commentary and reflection on humanity, humans and the lives we exist in and out of.

The title of this review is a quote from Allen Ginsberg.

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