The following is an excerpt from Split This Rock Director Sarah Browning's article in Sojourners, "You Are My Mirror: Poets resist anti-immigration laws with defiance, beauty, and social media" For the full article, click here.
Poets have always played this role, naming injustices and imagining alternatives, acting as visionaries for a society. In the United States, this tradition begins with our great democrat Walt Whitman and continues unbroken through the 20th century, through the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement, but also through the Beats, feminist poets, and the Chicano Art Movement. Poetry and other art forms can combat despair, provide inspiration to those working in the trenches of movements for social change, humanize those we are taught to fear (whoever they may be), and build bridges across our differences, telling our human stories. A poem can be a history lesson -- sometimes the only one we have.
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