Afflict the Comfortable: Martin Espada at the Poetry Foundation

Kevin Canfield interviews Martín Espada at The Poetry Foundation. An excerpt follows. For the full text, click here:

In a sense, this anecdote encapsulates Espada’s poetry career. Over the course of almost 20 collections of poetry, essays and translations, Espada—a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his 2006 collection The Republic of Poetry—has proved to be the voice of the underdog, a resourceful writer motivated by both personal and political concerns.

“In many of my poems that go beyond the law, I see myself as an advocate, speaking on behalf of those who don’t have an opportunity to be heard,” he says, from his home in Amherst. “Whereas this is a somewhat controversial position to take in the poetry world, in the world I come from as an attorney it was a very natural thing to do.”

Poems for Peace by Philip Metres

In this Poetry Foundation article, Philip Metres, who was part of a panel called “Peace Shelves” at Split This Rock this year, talks about the challenges of compiling a peace canon of poetry (as opposed to merely anti-war). For the full article, click here.

How to imagine peace, how to make peace? In our conversations on the Peace Shelf, three general subcategories emerged, though these were full of overlap and contradiction: Sorrows, Resistance, and Alternative Visions. It’s simple enough: we need to witness and chronicle the horrors of war, we need to resist and find models of resistance, and we need to imagine and build another world. Even if modern poetry has been marked by a resistance to the glorification of war, vividly shown by the World War I soldier poets and many others, the important work of poetic dissent has been, too often, via negativa—resistance to the dominant narrative, rather than offering another way.