What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump

[A Book Recommendation by Dante Di Stefano]

What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump
Ed. Martín Espada
Curbstone Books, 2019

In his essay, “Filthy Presidentiad: Walt Whitman in the Age of Trump,” published in the November issue of Poetry magazine, three time Best American Poetry contributor Martín Espada argues that in “the bicentennial of democracy’s bard,” Whitman’s democratic vision might provide Americans of the twenty-first century with a means to navigate the murk of a demagogic presidency and a twenty-four hour news cycle. Espada underscores that Whitman’s vision of democracy involved radical openness (“Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs”), empathy (“Whoever degrades another degrades me”), and polyvocality (“Through me many long dumb voices”). “Filthy Presidentiad” also juxtaposes Leaves of Grass against the current border crisis and examines Whitman’s legacy in Latin America and the Caribbean from José Martí to the aftermath of Hurricane María. Espada ends with a discussion of his own poem “Letter to My Father,” itself a reminder to “resist much / obey little,” a sentiment that would have resonated with the poem’s subject, Frank Espada, noted community activist, photographer, and creator of the Puerto Rican Diaspora Documentary Project. In short, “Filthy Presidentiad” is required reading for anyone who loves poetry, justice, courage, and freedom.

“Filthy Presidentiad” provides a clarifying lens through which to view Espada’s recent projects as poet and anthologist. Like “Letter to My Father,” Espada’s recent poem, “Floaters,” (published in the November issue of Poetry magazine) owes something to Whitman in its formal structure; more importantly, “Floaters” enacts Whitman’s injunction to poets of the future “to dauntlessly confront…injustice” and to “counteract dangers, immensest ones, already looming in America.” “Floaters” reflects on the deaths of twenty-five-year-old Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez, and his twenty-three-month-old daughter, Angie Valeria Martínez Ávalos, Salvadoran migrants whose corpses were found and photographed face down after drowning in the Río Grande. The poem also examines the callous rhetoric of the “I’m10-15” Border Patrol Facebook group in response to the viral images of the tragedy. A few days ago, a far-right white supremacist website published an essay attacking Espada’s poem, “Floaters” and his essay, “Filthy Presidentiad.” At first glance, it might seem odd that such an attack would even happen, but, on further consideration, Espada’s poem, and his essay, represent an existential threat any group whose continuance depends on foisting indignities and silence onto those it deems its enemies. As with Whitman, the threads that connect the stars in Espada’s “Floaters” (and in “Filthy Presidentiad”) are the moral filaments of a great unbridled wildly diffuse imaginative sympathy.

Every poem in Martín Espada’s new anthology, What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump (Curbstone Books, an imprint of Northwestern University Press), expresses and embodies a similar form of imaginative sympathy. As Espada notes in his preface: “This is an anthology of poems in the Age of Trump—and much more than Trump. To be sure, there are poems about Trump and his pathological demagoguery, or that rose in the throat of the poet the day after his election, some in mourning, some organizing the next protest.” However, the poems in these pages are not mere screeds, they are not solely jeremiads, they are more than the timebound marginalia of a miasmatic political era; surely, these are poems of witness in the sense that Carolyn Forché—a contributor to Espada’s volume—famously articulated in her introduction to her 1993 anthology Against Forgetting. This poetry of witness—poetry that is political but not broadly polemical, poetry that is evidentiary and resilient—is the kind of poetry Espada has been writing and anthologizing for his entire career in letters; this kind of political poetry flourishes now, perhaps, more than ever before in the history of American poetry. Espada’s long apprenticeship to Whitman, and to witnessing, ensures a critical rigor in the selection of poems included in the new anthology’s pages. Each poem in What Saves Us is what Julia Alvarez—another contributor—calls “an abacus of conscience” in her poem “Refugee Women.”

The range of poets and poems in What Saves Us astounds even as it fortifies; reading this collection from cover to cover, one walks away feeling more empathetic than outraged. At the heart of this anthology, the magnanimous golden splinter of a hard earned duende directs the reader’s gaze toward a hopeful future. This unexpected hopefulness arises perhaps because even the poems that predate the Trump regime in this volume—Elizabeth Alexander’s “Smile,” Donald Hall’s “A Prophecy of Amos,” Marilyn Nelson’s “Honor Guard,” Robert Pinsky’s “Serpent Knowledge,” and Daisy Zamora’s “Death Abroad,” to name a notable few—“assert,” as Espada puts it in his preface, “our common humanity in the face of dehumanization.” torrin a. greathouse’s “On Confinement” exemplifies the assertion of a common humanity in the face of state-sanctioned brutality as it explores the subjectivity of a trans woman forced to do time in a men’s jail, “where to fail at death / would be a breach // of my probation.” Kamilah Aisha Moon’s poem, “Fannie Lou Hamer,” similarly stands out as it details a university professor’s interactions with a privileged conservative student; this student “doesn’t know who / Fannie Lou Hamer is / and never has to.” Moon reframes the political, social, economic, and racial divides in contemporary America within the context of national and personal histories, as when the speaker of the poem moves from discussing her parents to wondering about her ancestors:

    How did they survive
    so much worse, the millions
    with all of their scars!
    What would these rivers be
    without their weeping,
    these streets without
    their faith & sweat?

Like “Fannie Lou Hamer” John Murillo’s poem, selected by Natasha Tretheway for inclusion in The Best American Poetry 2017, “Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Birds,” hinges on an invocation of the speaker’s parents, which leads to a deeper investigation of what Espada phrases, in his preface, as “the indoctrination of violence that must be uprooted within us.”

Many poems in What Saves Us signal a comparable kind of uprooting. Leslie McGrath’s “Rage Bracelet” uproots the deeply ingrained nightmare logic of patriarchy: “every landscape wants a shadow / every abbatoir a drain.” Luivette Resto’s two poems uproot the fears connected with motherhood in a misogynistic and racist culture.  Maria Nazos’s two poems uproot xenophobia and domestic violence with an admirable formal dexterity. Richard Michelson’s “Fake News” uproots anti-Semitism and alternative facts from Chaucer to Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Chen Chen’s “The School of Logic” uproots homophobia. Lauren Marie Schmidt’s “The Social Worker’s Advice” uproots the hardheartedness of institutionalized mercy, arguing for an empathy that bears neck to fang. The most Whitmanesque of poems anthologized in this book, Aracelis Girmay’s “You Are Who I Love,” uproots the very notion of inauguration on Inauguration Day 2017. Girmay’s poem contains multitudes, and its varied carols end:

    You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of quiet, in the rooms of shouting,
    in the airport terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each of us looking
    out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here,
    witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage,
    which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love           You are
    who I love           You and you and you are who

Read What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump if only to celebrate “the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all,” so full of tenderness, fury, and love.

---

Note: Below I’ve included four poems from the anthology: Richard Blanco’s “Dreaming a Wall,” Danielle Legros Georges’s “Shithole,” Maria Mazziotti Gillan’s “Daddy, We Called You,” and the title poem, Bruce Weigl’s “What Saves Us.” The anthology also includes poems by Patricia Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, Ocean Vuong, Tim Seibles, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, Alicia Ostriker, Dorianne Laux, Jan Beatty, Afaa Michael Weaver, Danez Smith, Kwame Dawes, Chase Twichell, Paul Mariani, Rafael Campo, Jane Hirshfield, Jim Daniels, Brian Clements, and many more. See the full list of contributors here. I am grateful and humbled to have two of my own poems included in such estimable company. ~Dante Di Stefano

    Richard Blanco

    Dreaming a Wall

    I would build a great wall, and nobody    
    builds walls better than me, believe me…
                                        —Donald Trump

    He hates his neighbors’ flowers, claims his
    are redder, bluer, whiter than theirs, believes
    his bees work harder, his soil richer, blacker.
    He hears birds sing sweeter in his trees, taller
    and fuller, too, but not enough to screen out
    the nameless faces next door that he calls
    liars, thieves who’d steal his juicier fruit, kill
    for his wetter rain and brighter sun. He keeps
    a steely eye on them, mocks the too cheery
    colors of their homes, too small and too close
    to his own, painted white, with room to spare.
    He curses the giggles of their children always
    barefoot in the yard, chasing their yappy dogs.
    He wishes them dead. Closes his blinds. Refuses
    to let light from their windows pollute his eyes
    with their lives. Denies their silhouettes dining
    at the kitchen table, laughing in the living room,
    the goodnight kisses through every bedroom.
    Slouched in his couch, grumbling over the news
    he dismisses as fake, he changes the channel
    to an old cowboy Western. Amid the clamor
    of gunshots he dozes off thinking of his dream
    where he stakes a line between him and all
    his neighbors, stabs the ground as he would
    their chests. Forms a footing cast in blood-red
    earth, bends steel bars as he would their bones
    with his bare fists and buries them in concrete.
    Mortar mixed thick with anger, each brick laid
    heavy with revenge, he smiles as he finishes
    the last course high enough to imagine them
    more miserable and lonely than him alone
    inside his wall, sitting on his greener lawn,
    breathing his fresher air, under his bluer sky.

 

    Danielle Legros Georges

    Shithole

    eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

    I am the interrupter, hijacking your train
    of thoughts. call me maldito, cabrón,

    La Bestía. Get on top of me and I’ll throw
    you off after you beg. I’ll ride you like

    a borrowed mule. Drive you across the river
    and sell you up it. Call me coyote. Call me

    wolf. Call me whatever the fuck animal
    you like. Missionary. Priest. Call me

    Mr. President. I’m all green. A blue gasp.
    I’m the womb sterilizer, syringe and suction.

    I’ll drown you in a teaspoon of potassium
    chloride. I was born an abomination

    At the age of one I crawled out of the Congo
    dragging my sack full of hands.

    At the age of two I mechanized my scythe.
    At the age of three I wove myself a cape of flies.

    At the age of four I blow the noses off
    Sphinxes and studied the hieroglyphs

    of your tomb. At the age of five I became
    an angel, cunning, big-eared. at the age

    of six I shot down the moon then I shot down
    the sun. I am a nuclear bomb set for noon,

    the paratext of your nightmare,
    the translator of your tribulation.

    I am a constipation. The worm nestled
    in your colon. The parasite entering

    your left ear. The sweetest liar. The drone
    of your inner war. The architect of your gas

    chamber. The poisoner of your water.
    The multiplier. I am the radioactive

    sphincter. the unthinkable, intolerable
    bleached ass.

 

    Maria Mazziotti Gillan

    Daddy, We Called You

    “Daddy” we called you, “Daddy”
    when we talked to each other in the street,
    pulling on our American faces,
    shaping our lives in Paterson slang.

    Inside our house, we spoke
    a Southern Italian dialect
    mixed with English
    and we called you “Papa”

    but outside again, you became Daddy
    and we spoke of you to our friends
    as “my father”
    imagining we were speaking
    of that “Father Knows Best”
    T.V. character
    in his dark business suit,
    carrying his briefcase into his house,
    retreating to his paneled den,
    his big living room and dining room,
    his frilly-aproned wife
    who greeted him at the door
    with a kiss. Such space

    and silence in that house.
    We lived in one big room-
    living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom,
    all in one, dominated by the gray oak dining table
    around which we sat, talking and laughing,
    listening to your stories,
    your political arguments with your friends,

    Papa, how you glowed in company light,
    happy when the other immigrants
    came to you for help with their taxes
    or legal papers.

    It was only outside that glowing circle
    that I denied you, denied your long hours
    as night watchman in Royal Machine Shop.
    One night, riding home from a date,
    my middle class, American boyfriend
    kissed me at the light; I looked up
    and met your eyes as you stood at the corner

    near Royal Machine. It was nearly midnight.
    January. Cold and Windy. You were waiting
    for the bus, the streetlight illuminating
    your face. I pretended I did not see you,
    let my boyfriend pull away, leaving you
    on the empty corner waiting for the bus
    to take you home. You never mentioned it,
    never said that you knew
    how often I lied about what you did for a living
    or that I was ashamed to have my boyfriend see you,
    find out about your second shift work, your broken English.

    Today, remembering that moment,
    still illuminated in my mind
    by the streetlamp's gray light,
    I think of my own son
    and the distance between us,
    greater than miles.

    Papa,
    silk worker,
    janitor,
    night watchman,
    immigrant Italian,
    I honor the years you spent in menial work
    slipping down the ladder
    as your body failed you

    while your mind, so quick and sharp,
    longed to escape,
    honor the times you got out of bed
    after sleeping only an hour,
    to take me to school or pick me up;
    the warm bakery rolls you bought for me
    on the way home from the night shift.

    the letter
    you wrote
    to the editors
    of local newspapers.

    Papa,
    silk worker,
    janitor,
    night watchman,
    immigrant Italian,
    better than any "Father Knows Best" father,
    bland as white rice,
    with your wine press in the cellar,
    with the newspapers you collected
    out of garbage piles to turn into money
    you banked for us,
    with your mouse traps,
    with your cracked and calloused hands,
    with your yellowed teeth.

    Papa,
    dragging your dead leg
    through the factories of Paterson,
    I am outside the house now,
    shouting your name.

 

    Bruce Weigl

    What Saves Us

    We are wrapped around each other in
    the back of my father's car parked
    in the empty lot of the high school
    of our failures, the sweat on her neck
    like oil. The next morning, I would leave
    for the war and I thought I had something
    coming for that, I thought to myself
    that I would not die never having
    been inside her long body. I pulled
    her skirt above her waist like an umbrella
    inside out by the storm. I pulled
    her cotton panties up as high as
    she could stand. I was on fire. Heaven
    was in sight. We were drowning on our
    tongues and I tried to tear my pants off
    when she stopped so suddenly
    we were surrounded only by my shuddering
    and by the school bells grinding in the
    empty halls. She reached to find something,
    a silver crucifix on a silver
    chain, the tiny savior's head hanging
    and stakes through his hands and his feet.
    She put it around my neck and held
    me so long the black wings of my heart
    were calmed. We are not always right
    about what we think will save us.
    I thought that dragging the angel down would
    save me, but instead I carried the crucifix
    in my pocket and rubbed it on my
    face and lips nights the rockets roared in.

    People die sometimes so near you
    you feel them struggling to cross over,
    the deep untangling, of one body from another.

---

Comments

[Kent Johnson]

This seems like an appropriate time to remind people of Dante's review here of a sister anthology to What Saves Us: That being Resist Much/Obey Little: Poems for the Resistance, a 750 page anthology that was the first collective poetic response to the Trump era. So good to see the big book now edited by Martin Espada.

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2017/03/zero-at-the-bone-dante-di-stefano-reviews-.html

[The Best American Poetry]

Thank you, Dante. Bruce Weigl's "What Saves Us" is a terrific title poem. -- DL

[Twyla M. Hansen]

And a true "sister" anthology to Resist Much/ Obey Little is Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse edited by Grace Bauer and Julie Kane. Over 200 writers responding to the U.S. presidential candidate elected in 2016. https://www.vidaweb.org/sarah-fawn-interviews-the-editors-of-nasty-women-poets-an-unapologetic-anthology-of-subversive-verse/ (https://www.amazon.com/Nasty-Women-Poets-Unapologetic-Subversive/dp/0998196339)