To be “political” assumes outspokenness. To be actively engaged. “Political” connotes a struggle, implies the walking of a line (as in politically correct, politically conscientious, one compliant with policies). Often it indicates a yielding. To pay attention to office politics, for example, means taking great care not to “step on someone else’s toes” not to “step out of line” to “follow the chain of command.” Yet, a politician is one whom no one can trust. The very designation of being a politician has come to mean liar, two-faced, socially irresponsible. Two poems stood out for me as examples of the two-sidedness of politics: one that aims to be outspoken and life-changing, and one that attempts to reveal the mechanisms behind a political language that seeks to obscure such outspokenness.

Alaan Bowe’s “Every Knotted Fist” is anything but silent. In this poem, the act of writing (and writing as a form of speech) is dangerous and divisive, even at times blinding the speaker of the poem with rage. Bowe identifies the knotted fist as the place where, “all my/ fuckin’ grudges” are held. The title points to the importance of this image as the center from which the poem radiates. These central lines are themselves “knotted” in the center of the page:

gonna hold all my
fuckin’ grudges
in every knotted fist

The pen, the words that flow from the pen are “little deaths” (the possible allusion to orgasm should not be ignored here), its strokes “bludgeon” the fingers and cause blood to “dapple the page.” In this poem, the tongue is burning with the need to speak, and the tongue refuses to be silenced by anything, even by physical interaction and the possibility of love:

Somebody gave me a hug yesterday
I don’t know who
I didn’t get that good a look at her

The rage contained in the poem, in isolated “knots” of words overpowers any positive emotion or outcome that could have occurred. The poem flows from Author, Audience and Community to Opposition, Murder, and Pain. The tone of the words Bowe uses are harsh and biting:

stroke
death
murder
rape
incest
torture
forced
bludgeon
spit
blood
knotted
clubbed

The use of the violent “o” sounds and the guttural “u” sounds speak of violence, their sounds cutting through the silence like blades. The structure of the words on the page forces the reader to pay attention to it. One must note the word clusters in order to behold the poem, is forced to feel the knotted anger inherent in the clumped lines.

By contrast, Linh Dinh’s “The Most Beautiful Word” has no truly distinctive form, but displays its message in prose poem style. The poem has no obvious line breaks to take the reader’s attention away from the message; therefore, the transparency of the message stands in direct contrast to the intent of the poem’s language to obscure certain “political” acts. In the lines “Don’t say, ‘The bullet yawed inside the body.’ Say, ‘The bullet danced inside the body,’” Dinh is revealing political language’s desire to obscure the cold, hard facts in a diffusive light. There is still a bullet, and there is still a body, but the act of the bullet dancing or tumbling hides the violent action of the bullet splitting the body open. Instead of an act of violence being enacted upon the body, the bullet becomes a sort of protagonist, beautifully dancing through its victim, “forward and upward.” Dinh calls attention to this desire of certain political language to put a lovely spin on acts of abhorrent violence by calling this strategy out and demanding that it answer for itself. The poem cannot answer and neither can the victim, for the victim has a collapsed face, a broken mandible, swallowed teeth and a punctured tongue.

It is important to these poets that the tongue have a place in these poems. As the organ of speech, the image representing voice, the tongue has two different lives in both of the poems. In Dinh’s poem, the tongue is useless and silent. In Bowe’s poem, the tongue is a dangerous weapon that spits blood on the page. When the tongue in “The Most Beautiful Word” is forced to use only beautiful-sounding words instead of ugly ones, we see the modern political machine’s attempts to remove dangerous, inciteful words from its vocabulary and thus sweeten the force of its blows. Dinh’s words are much more sonorous than Bowe’s:

beautiful
vesicle
harvest
danced
tumbled
upward
forward
llight
lover
rainbow
blue threads
soul

And yet, Dinh is not entirely successful at excoriating all the weighted words from his poem. The political machine has merely pulled a thin veneer over the rottenness hidden within:

burnt
steaming
bleeding
yaw
fracture
clanked.

These words are heavy, sounding weighted in the ear when spoken and weighted in the mind when read.