Michael T. Young: Between the Horrors and the Beauty

When I was a young, aspiring poet, I saw poetry as a thing separate from politics. Politics was the language of deception, connivance and convenience. Even the best politician traffics in the language of back-alley deals. Poetry, on the other hand, is the highest form of language, a refining of it to its purest state. It was the creation of an object of beauty that needed to keep itself unpolluted. And I still believe that in a sense. But I’ve traveled a long way since that puritanical beginning to be where I am now: certain that the poet’s work is inherently political and with a new book that confronts issues of gun violence, racism, and abuses of power. I wondered recently how I got here. 

I grew up in a racist family. My grandparents in particular were outspokenly so. I remember even when very young loathing the kind of hateful talk my grandfather spat out casually. When I became a poet at fifteen, what attracted me was the beauty of language. The language of poetry sang; it enchanted. It was the language of love that opposed racist hate. It was the music of language, its harmony and synthesis rather than division, prejudice, and discord. It was the language of attention to everything: the earth, life, people, beauty, even the ugliness—but with a mind to understand rather than exclude or discard. Because of this linguistic opposition, I couldn’t figure out how to approach those toxic subjects of racism and violence but still create a thing of beauty. There was something antithetical in their linguistic natures that made them irreconcilable. Although I understood someone like Auden could write about terrible things and yet do it in a language undeniably of the highest order, of the most beautiful cadences, imagery, reflection, and resonances; I just didn’t know how to do it myself. The gap between the horrors and the beauty was unbridgeable in my aesthetic efforts. 

Then came Trump’s election in 2016. Racists and white supremacists felt validated by his election, and it was everywhere evident. My wife and I sat in our kitchen discussing how to protect people in our family and in our church who, for those racists, weren’t the right color. I had to confront issues long avoided because they were rising with a violence equal to Blake’s spectres. The racism, gun violence, white privilege, and societal neglect of minorities required the opposing voice of poetry. I realized that no matter how poorly written they were, I had to write those poems. And through that labor, I learned how to write political poems. Although, I still bulk at calling them “political poems.” I don’t think of “September 1, 1939” as a political poem. It’s simply a great poem whose topic is undeniably political. But it’s a poem first, an art object. Its material is political. 

Poems are made out of words and therefore inescapably about something. It’s similar to the way a sculpture is made out of stone or metal but it’s still a sculpture. The stone or metal is the substance but it’s just raw material. With a poem, the dimension of semantics is nearly impossible to avoid. Some surrealists do. Although, given the right context, even they plunge into political necessity. Paul Eluard is a good example. So is Rene Char and Aimé Césaire. But I never saw myself as a surrealist poet, even as I like to use some of their techniques when writing. 

The first writer to help me shift my perspective was Adrienne Rich. Rich was one of the many writers during the first Trump Administration I felt compelled to read. She helped me orient myself to the more hostile American landscape. Rich talked in an interview about her own struggle to write poems not “about” political experience but “out of” political experience. And what’s the significant difference? Poems “about” political experience are merely commentary, they are written from a perspective outside something which remains to some degree foreign. But poems “out of” political experience are poems emerging from the life of the poet, from within it. This was one of the keys for me because my avoidance of certain social or political subjects came from an inability to write about those subjects in a way that met my aesthetic demands. In other words, when I wrote them, they were merely commentary and not works of art because I hadn’t fully assimilated those experiences to write “out of them” rather than “about them.” This forced me to learn how to imaginatively shape the material of experience without violating the reality of that material. This has roots in the old idea that the personal is universal, for so too is the political, when directly experienced or fully assimilated. But it’s a constant wrestling with such topics to strike the proper balance; it’s never easy. I often must tackle the same subject in several different poems before I get a single good poem about that topic. Every poem in this vein is more than an aesthetic challenge, it is a wrestling with demons, a slaying of dragons.

That was a vital shift in my mental perspective about what constituted political subjects. If something political affects my life, then I need to write about it from that experience to realize it fully in poetry. But I needed a technique or tactic that fulfilled that perspective. That took a little time too. It came down to what Aristotle called the poet’s greatest ability: the use of metaphor. Poets think metaphorically, indeed, language itself is metaphorical. The word “tree” isn’t a tree, but we come to so imaginatively associate that symbol with those living things that it instantly conjures their likeness to mind. It’s a kind of magic. And the poet that can trust the metaphors and music of language to lead him, will find his way. And that was the technique I adopted along with that new perspective provided by Rich. I needed to trust the metaphors would guide me out of mere dry, ugly polemic. For one doesn’t write a poem to make a point: that’s what an epigram or essay is for. One write’s a poem out of, as Frost put it, “a sense of wrong.” And therein is the way to follow the metaphors as a power against injustice, against that “sense of wrong.” Like a surfer, a poet should ride the wave of his language to shore. The shore is there and language is always lapping the shore. He must trust it to bring him home. This is why what June Jordan said is true, “Poetry is a political act because it involves telling the truth.” 

This also explains why we know when a poet is manipulating his poem toward another end, bending it toward an end outside the drift of metaphor and the governing language of the poem. And we know it means his intention is to manipulate us, our thinking and feeling. But as Keats put it, “we hate a poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” Whether liberal or conservative, such manipulation is repulsive because it’s the opposite of the language of poetry. But a poet allowing the governing metaphor and music to guide the poem is free and playful, and this invites every reader in. We can feel him following rather than leading and he’s helping us along to discover what he is discovering. The poem comes as a revelation rather than as a pronouncement. Which is not to say there isn’t a point of view or authority in the voice. The shore lies in a certain direction, after all. But we feel in every word that the poet trusts his aesthetic sense not to betray his moral sense. In fact, he might not distinguish between them, or, as Joseph Brodsky, he might believe his aesthetic sense is more reliable than his morals. It’s why a progressive such as I can enjoy the poetry of politically conservative poets like Yeats or Frost. Yeats and Frost trusted the metaphors, not their politics, to write the poems. Whatever their positions, the poems sing; they are works of art rather than mere polemic.

Often the difficulty is finding the balance between bearing witness and allowing the imagination its freedom to treat experience as material for transforming it into art. When we experience a social or political outrage and bear witness without imaginative transformation, we have not a poem but a piece of journalism. But if the imagination works the material too much, we disconnect from the injustice and no longer bear witness to it. So, in a way, we need the imagination to play but without straying off the specific playground we have set for it. It needs to stay inside the sandbox. This is how we prevent the reality of the subject from being violated by the imagination that works on it. In the struggle to write those poems I felt compelled to write, I learned that Adrienne Rich was correct when she said in her book Arts of the Possible, “Writers and intellectuals can name, we can describe, we can depict, we can witness—without sacrificing craft, nuance, or beauty.” 

Ten years into this endeavor, I’ve come to believe artists have an obligation to speak out politically. I especially find this true as a poet. For it’s now impossible for me to separate freedom of speech in general from my freedom as a poet. Words are my medium. As soon as a government starts encroaching on free expression in general and in any form, they diminish my sphere as an artist. Hence the Trump Administration’s effort to erase or control the narrative of American history, particularly when it comes to African American and women’s history—this is directly trying to control the imagination and diminish how we see ourselves and who we can become. And then there are the attacks on the universities and DEI programs. These government encroachments are a manipulation of the story we tell ourselves about who we are, a shrinking of imaginative potential. And this directly impinges on the language of poets and why, ultimately, the mere writing of poetry is political. 

Poetry derives from being attentive to the world. Poets observe, bear witness, see connections. Again, as Adrienne Rich put it, “There is nothing more unnerving and yet empowering than the making of connections.” That’s the poet’s daily bread. But how can we be attentive to the details of a tree—its changes through seasons or days, its shuddering in the wind, its yielding in its limbs to the arc of the sun, the life that nests in it—how could we be attentive to these nuances of a tree and blind to the injustice to our neighbor and still call ourselves witnesses or even attentive? To turn a blind eye to anything within our field of experience is to do the work of a dictator for him. It’s self-censorship. A poet who writes a poem about a tree under an authoritarian state must make the connection that that tree is different from a tree in a democracy. His tree is potentially a gallows. And the poet who ignores that betrays his sensibility. 

Of course, what constitutes political poetry varies from context to context. Joseph Brodsky was exiled not because he wrote overtly political poetry but because he refused to take the state’s ideology into account at all. Under a regime that seeks to control thought, that act itself is political. So, depending on the stage of dictatorship one is under, being a political artist is inevitable. Every fascist state seeks some level of control over the narrative, some power over what people express and even what they think. A totalitarian regime seeks total control. But the imagination of the poet must be free to entertain any possibility, and that makes it a threat to that kind of control. A fascist state wants to limit what its citizens can imagine. The narrative of the state is to be the only narrative. And depending on how intimately that regime seeks to exert its authority, a poet could one day hear a knock on his door merely for writing a poem about a tree. 

Copyright 2026 Michael T. Young

Mountain Climbing a River is Michael T. Young’s fourth collection. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award for Living in the Counterpoint. He lives with his wife and children in Jersey City, New Jersey.