By its very nature poetry is connected with the world and our realities, as well as imagination. It emerges out of making sense of the world and finding meaning in the complexities, ambiguities and incongruities of living. It is in these realities and intangibles that poetry lives and finds its being.

Of course that suggests that poetry is necessarily wide in scope and form, across culures, languages, times and places, and in many ways of thinking and being. That is the power of poetry, and its rightful purpose: to look at all the multiple, scattered  wonders of human experience. It transects all that is in this experience, interculturally and linquistically, and brings attention to the differences that make us all the more interesting as a species. Put simply, all cultures have poetry, and it is ancient and modern, in all our creativities, modes of presentation and ways to squeeze out meaning. Poetry is universality.

Given this diversity, breadth and scope one should expect that poetry encompasses many purposes. One of these purposes is critique: to foster awareness, to challenge the unfairness of what we see in the world of humans living with each other in a variety of circumstances, to defy systems that may oppress, and to bring attention to societies where disorder, war, cruelty and inequity appear to go unchallenged or are even celebrated as normative.

So, poetry, alongside the goals to find beauty, unfurl experience and reflect on life and the world in all its varieties and forms, has the duty to call out the ugly, challenge the unjust and stand for the rights of those who may not have voice.

I stand in this purpose for poetry as social action, as praxis, as resistance, as emancipation, as voicing concerns for those who may not have voice, as advocating for those who are oppressed or seek justice or who are silenced in systems that do not want to hear any other discourse but their own. I write this from the vision afforded by great poet activists who have pointed the way.

Of course, I make no claim to speak for people who can speak for themselves out of their own culure and distinct perspectives. There are wonderful poets who write our of country, language, and cuIture. I do not want to speak when I have no right to speak. i appropriate not.  I speak only for me: I plea only from what I see and feel, and it is up to the reader to make of it what they will.

So, poetry is not just about describing the world or feeling in the world, or even offering wisdom and understanding. It is also about protest, even offence: challenging all that stands in the way of people finding a good and just life, and seeking happiness in a path of their own choosing. It is about pointing to distortions and untruths that amount to nothing more that cruel lies. Poetry thus has the potential to stand in the courthouse of reckoning.

This poetry of protest, that has existed for hundreds of years, seeks to bring awareness and call attention to that which often stands as a blight in front of us and needs to be called out, even if those who lead choose to be blind.

---