2026-08-02
Polemics vs Poetry
I feel fortunate to live in Winona, an island-city of about 30,000 surrounded by the Mississippi. My wife Monica and I have developed some deep friendships and alliances here, and we’ve been very active promoting the issues we feel deeply about.
One group, nameless and informal, has met each Monday at 5 p.m. at the corner of Broadway and Main to protest current immoral impracticalities., its most obvious manifestations being war. We’ve done this every Monday for about a year and a half. We’ve had as many as 250 at these gatherings, with terrible heat and cold shrinking our numbers to 100 or so. We’ve also joined a few much larger gatherings at nearby Windom Park, with numbers ranging from 600-800. We think of ourselves as Little Engines That Could as we stand there with our protest signs.
This past Monday several people in cars honked to say yes to us, as did lone strangers in a couple of huge semi-trucks. Four guys in cars speeding past gave us the finger. Most others drove past as if we did not exist.
Those giving us the finger have their minds made up, and those minds are closed. The finger makes an obvious closing statement. It is a polemic, not a poem.
It seems obvious that about 25% of the voting public is deeply committed to the cult of Trump. I have little hope of communicating with them in reasonable ways, even though I think it’s important for writers seeking a better world to base their principles on knowledge. Knowledge is grounded on often hard-earned facts and solid reasoning. But I also know that knowledge is often subject to amendments, contexts and revisions, and that it provides provisional understandings based on probability curves. It has certain vulnerabilities.
Belief is very unlike knowledge. Belief is based on faith, emotion and tradition, and it boasts of absolute certainty. Hard-core Belief enjoys giving Knowledge the finger. Knowledge and its reasoned arguments cannot expect to compete with Belief and win a convert.
I frankly believe it’s usually not worth the effort. I have strong urges, but I keep my middle finger tucked in.
I think it’s much more important to reach out to those who drive by without honking yes or middle-fingering us. They may include those who have little interest in politics, or those who didn’t vote this time, or those only perhaps open to voting a different way. These often include outsiders, the confused, the work-driven, and, crucially, the young wondering if political life is worth the bother.
I also try to keep in mind the difference between polemic and what I consider good poetry. Polemic is strident, cocky, top-down authoritarian. It does not turn the other cheek, discuss complexities, listen sympathetically, or try to understand “otherness.” If I may borrow a poetic trope—polemic chooses to howl, usually about itself.
Polemic also lends itself to a type of communication I learned to define via a s phrase I memorized years ago. It indulges itself in “the great non-differentiated non-familiar.” In short, polemic encourages stereotyping—the indiscriminate lumping together of those we know little about. It caricatures the complexities present in identity groups, nations, tribes, and political parties.
Now and then I think of those making no comment as they drive by our protest demonstrations as belonging to “the great non-differentiated non-familiar.” And I know my protest group’s statement to those driving by is polemic rather than poetry. I’m there mostly to establish a sense of solidarity with others like me. I communicate very little about why those driving past should think and vote the way I do.
Our English grammar, and its common use—unfortunately—do not make it easy for us to be better writers or political commentators. Our grammar is based largely on exclusive categories. It has a prejudice for divisiveness. It directs us toward yes and no, without necessarily contextualizing or intoning those responses. It divides grammatical basics into noun and verb, as if these separate categories are how reality really is. It inclines us toward easy conclusions about “right” and “wrong,” “us” and “them,” and “black” and “white.”
Imagine yourself as a nine-year old kid with dark skin on a playground where the terms “Black” and “White” are routinely used. That kid cannot escape the common, and powerful, connotations: Most of us associate “black” with “ignorance,” “fear,” and “evil.” If you’re that nine year old, by the time you’re 14 you’re likely to be tribalized and not feeling good about your primary public identity, with conscientious teachers wondering how to get kids to get along.
Good poetry and good fiction both abhor the stereotype. Their proper messaging depends on nuances, connotations, and well-designed structures. They do justice to complexities, and sympathetically convey the “otherness” we struggle to discover in ourselves. They perhaps more effectively whisper rather than howl. Their messages perhaps get more deeply into us that way, and stay.
Politics allows “parties”—aka “parts”—to have their say. Accordingly, much of our political language lends itself to divisiveness. Our challenge, as we try so belatedly to try to change the terrible trends we’re enduring, is how to change our language too. We all have many identities, most of them not prioritized, and sometimes carelessly so. Right-wing commentators have made effective jokes of “woke” movements that have surrendered their important diversities and complexities to the stereotypes of language they have routinely used to formalize—and harden—their identities.
The larger cultural context is another problem for those trying to make important political impressions. Our general culture, sadly, is based largely on polemics usually cleverly pushed on us as entertainments and advertisements. These operate faithfully by using their favorite techniques: Stimulation (often based on fear, sex, violence and overstatement), and distraction. Stimulation keeps us hyped up. Distraction takes us away from what’s real and important, the systems that underlie many of our problems.
We all endure the entertainments and literally hundreds of daily ads too well, and their final effect is a downer. A recent poll reported in Harper’s Monthly Magazine (May 2026) gives us a dismal view of ourselves: The portion of Americans who, when asked, “what makes them proud of their country?” is miserably small. Only one in fifty, or 2% of all of us, say that our art and culture make us proud to be Americans.
So where do we put our money, our time, our attention? As writers we face the daunting problem of cultural conversion. We still tell ourselves the story that if we work hard we’ll get ahead and that money will trickle down and we’ll all live happily ever after. We don’t seem to have a popular counter-myth about how money is gushing and rocketing upward away from us, with bombs bursting in air.
If we live by the stories we tell, we—as writers and protesters—should try looking into those cars driving by with no comment to make to our protest signs. Who are those people? Do we ever talk to them in grocery store aisles, or after church, or in Joe’s Home-Plate Café? What makes them “others,” and do we have in us elements of their “otherness”? Are their stories ours too? Do the stories and poems we write feature them, or us?
Monica and I will be there again at 5 p.m. next Monday, waving our peace signs at cars rushing home from work. Those signs are loaded with stereotypes agreeable almost exclusively to those who already agree with us. We need better messaging than that—poems, narratives and face-to-face discussions that speak to those on the margins, and to the neighbors and strangers we tend to ignore and dismiss. Above all we need to listen to them, perhaps also to the wives and children of those who have given our peace signs the finger while rushing past.