Deep Listening As An Act of Resistance

In the days and weeks following the latest U.S. election, poetry listicles began to mushroom. It’s clear that we look to poetry in times of crisis. It’s also clear why: The poems that have been emerging offer inspiration, hope, resolve, a sense of history, and the spirit of resistance. Poetry reminds us that we are a strong community. “There is always a way through the ‘Wall,’” Juan Felipe Herrera states in the introduction to Boston Review’s chapbook Poems for Political Disaster. Literature celebrates our individual and collective lives. Edwidge Danticat, in “Poetry in a Time of Protest,” says of the inaugural speech that it “was dark, rancorous, unnuanced” and that “afterward, I wanted to fall into a poet’s carefully crafted, insightful, and at times elegiac words.” In addition to acting as a mirror, poetry can function as a window into experiences we haven’t had. As Don Share reminds us: “It’s a way of listening. When you’re reading a poem, you’re listening to what someone else is thinking and feeling and saying.” Poetry puts us in someone else’s shoes in order to find out that we’re not that different after all.

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