Syllabus for the weary activist.

Other poems, stories, books, and songs that have served as my nightwatchmen in the last decade:

Poems

Pablo Neruda, Canto General, a Whitmanesque song to the southern Americas--our history, culture, flora, fauna, infused with the poet's characteristic big-hearted vision and fierce tenderness for la gente sencilla, the simple folk. The poem was written largely while Neruda was in hiding in Chile to avoid arrest for his comments against the president, who had turned towards the right and outlawed Neruda's Communist Party. I love the story, confirmed by Neruda, that he hand-carried the contraband manuscript on his escape across the Andes to Argentina on horseback in the middle of the night.

Anna Akhmatova, Requiem, especially the poems, "I Am Not One of Those Who Left the Land" and "Instead of a Preface." Writing was activism of the first order for this favorite poet, who never compromised one for the other. And she paid the price, suffering intense persecution under the Stalinist regime. She and her son were both imprisoned, her husband was executed, but Akhmatova kept writing. It was her gesture of protest and liberation.

In "Instead of a Preface," she tells the story of waiting with other women outside the prison (she had been released) to visit her jailed son. A woman sidles up to her and whispers, "Can you describe this?" Akhmatova doesn't flinch, but replies, "I can." The woman's spirit is momentarily released from its fears: "Something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face."

Czeslaw Milosz. So many of the poems of this Polish exile and Nobel Prize winner are like the tuning forks choirmasters use to get choirs all singing at the same pitch. Hearing/reading Milosz's poems, I get back in tune morally. Here are just three: "Love," "Late Ripeness," and "Dedication."

In an interview with Poets & Writers, Milosz explained that the best writing is political, but not in the usual ways we think about politics as polemics and ideology, but political in the sense that any art that sinks below a certain level of awareness of its own time fails as art and fails us. He writes:

What is poetry which does not save Nations or people?

A connivance with official lies.

Martin Espada, one of our most important living activist poets. For me, his poem "Alabanza" in his collection Alabanza: New & Selected Poems, 1982-2002 is the best poem to come out of 9/11. With its comprehensive vision and compassion, this poem should have been...