A former editor introduced me to the Poetry Foundation‘s Poem of the Day. His parents were poets—not amateurs who scribbled doggerel on birthday cards, but professionals who published books and taught in a university writing program—and I imagine that for him, poetry was not something that was painstakingly pored over and decoded in a classroom but an especially beautiful and compressed way of expressing complex thoughts and feelings, one that’s not incompatible with the language of everyday life. He was a subscriber to the Poem of the Day, a daily e-mail of a selection from the Poetry Foundation’s vast archive, and sometimes he would forward poems that seemed particularly appropriate to a time and situation.
This, coincidentally, was exactly how I was feeling that day.
At that point, I wondered if the Poetry Foundation was, in its own oblique, poetic way, offering commentary on the election, and if this was a considered stance by the organization—if, in fact, it was defying the president-elect with poetry.
Over the past few weeks, the Poems of the Day have covered expected territory, like cold weather and impending Christmas. But then there have also been poems like “A Poem for the Cruel Majority” by Jerome Rothenberg, which begins thus:
Hail to the cruel majority!
They will punish the poor for being poor.
They will punish the dead for having died.
Nothing can make the dark turn into light
for the cruel majority.
Nothing can make them feel hunger or terror.
