Democracy is not for the People

Most readers know that poetry does not function the same way essays do, but political content often makes the difference harder to see. So when a poem suggests that artists “corner, beat and mug rich people” in order to halt the process of gentrification, we are tempted to argue about the political efficacy of violence, even if we do not treat most poems as testable maxims. It is not that the poem refutes its own call to violence, or claims it ironically, or rejects politics from the privilege of its safe remove. It’s that it does more than one thing at a time, at once stating a claim and stating that the claim is poetic—that is, not all it appears to be.

This misreading is partly the poem’s fault, of course. “Poem that is Pro-Violence” appears in Democracy Is Not for the People, a book of poetry entirely “in prose” (though not exactly of prose poems) that is full of similarly explicit, counterintuitive calls for violence, sacrifice, and poetic and political excess. (The cover features a full-color photo of a policeman in flames at a riot.) It is tempting to read this poem—in which “poets and artists appear to the wealthy as the fantasy that exploited classes accept, and even value, their exploitation”—as a useful guide to the book’s politics, if only because those politics are so aggressively inscrutable.

Because of this, many responses to this poem deal only with the claims it makes, rather than with those claims’ form or context. But that it is a poem—and that poetry’s politics are not identical to the literal sense of its utterances—is clear within the context of the whole collection. “Poem that is Pro-Violence” immediately follows “Poem that is Pro-Heaven,” in which Kaplan “proves” that people must become animals and commit immoral acts to reach heaven, because “humans can only approach the gods by deviating from their likeness.” The propositional logic of “Poem that is Pro-Heaven” mirrors that of “Poem that is Pro-Violence”—and thereby complicates it, if only because it’s difficult to imagine Kaplan, or any implied author, taking both positions at once.

The book coheres on account of, rather than in spite of, these contradictions. Although literature’s ability to maintain contradiction has been observed before, it is often forgotten in discussions of what is properly poetic in political poetry, and this is why “Poem that is Pro-Violence”...