It's Poetry Week. Death to Didaciticm

The apartheid era lasted half a century by silencing any voice that dared expose it. When the government’s gag orders on writers didn’t work, it simply censored the media. One news magazine kept covering the atrocities anyway: Drum Magazine. When it couldn’t publish prose, it got around the gag by publishing poetry.

So began the era of The Drum Poets, many of whom have become some of the most influential writers in modern literary history, not just in South Africa, but on a global scale. Some even won the Nobel Prize for Literature. This is poetry at its best. The pen, as the cliché goes, is mightier than the sword, and this was particularly evident during apartheid. It was artists who got the attention of international leaders and artists who convinced them to lay sanctions against South Africa.

And it was sanctions that pressured South Africa into running its first democratic election.

Poets changed the world just as they always had.

Still, you won’t see much poetry of import these days. Ever since the confessionists began writing about their own domestic lives, poets have withdrawn from politics en masse. This is a good or bad thing depending on who you’re asking.

Remember those Drum poets? My mentor taught them, and yet decades later he was fiercely distrustful of political poetry despite the fact that he, himself, frequently wrote political poems. I can explain this stance.

My mentor didn’t want us to write off politics entirely. He just wanted us to be suspicious of ourselves when we handled these issues. We should only write about them when the call to do so is great enough to produce legitimately good poems. We must feel them profoundly before we write about them. He wanted political poems to be deeply felt because anything less would come across as preachy.

In essence, he was saying, “Death to didacticism.”

When a poet sits down to write, their highest goal should be to pay respect to the artform. If we prioritise the message over the craft, we will fail. And failing does little for the message anyway. Didacticism flies in the face of poetry as an artform, so by all means have a message. Just make sure the poem is good.

Poets have changed the world in so many different ways. They’ve preserved history, inspired political change, and created a launching point for entire social movements. Poetry is uniquely powerful in this sense. It can’t emote as universally as music, but it can certainly speak more powerfully about complex issues. You could say poetry is the highest artform in the political and social spheres, so it’s worthwhile to tackle tough themes. Just do it well.

Exercise: Write a poem with a political or social message without being preachy.