TOWARD A POETRY THAT MATTERS:
EMILY DICKINSON AS ACTIVIST/ACTIVATOR
by Frances Payne Adler
Page 9
I wrote earlier about a dark time. We are here together, a few months from the RodneyKing beating and its aftermath in Los Angeles. I watched--as we all did--the buildings being torched and gutted, the lootings, the rage, the violence. I saw a man throw a garbage can through a store window, climb in and carry out a television. I saw another man roll a refrigerator down the street. I saw a woman rush out of a store, a large sack of diapers in one hand and her baby in the other. The next day, I saw men in U.S. military uniforms stand outside Ralph's supermarket, with machine guns poised.I saw the violence. And couldn't help hearing the voicelessness, the powerlessness. Thirty years earlier, we had the Watts riots, studies were done, commissions convened, conclusions compiled, and ignored. Little has changed. And last Spring, men and women white-hot angry at a system that has excluded them, given them no hope, a system that wasn't designed by them. I saw violence, and heard desperation, voicelessness.
Semester after semester in all of our classes, students outside the mainstream come to voice. Women and men. We have the roadmap. Emily Dickinson might say this is a time to be bold: to re-envision our role in the community, and make poetry matter.
