For over four decades, poet Stephen Wing has borne witness to U.S. military aggression abroad, inequity and injustice at home, and the stubborn resistance of generations of citizen activists. These poems reveal the human faces of poverty and prejudice, covert and conventional war, Pentagon planning for nuclear holocaust, and the ongoing struggle to right these wrongs. Throughout, Wing speaks in the language of everyday people who care about truth, meaning, and this country's founding principles. The centerpiece of the book is a chapbook-length tribute to the courageous people he met on a peace delegation to Colombia 2003.
From the author's Afterword:
"'Political poetry' is frequently dismissed as the practice of dragging poetry down to the level of politics- corrupt politicians, feuding parties, rigged elections- the poet as propagandist. But it also has the potential to raise politics up to the level of poetry: an act of imagination which reveals the hidden interconnections that link us all. For me, poetry is a way of responding to what moves me and of grappling with what really matters to me, which are usually one and the same. Though I personally have escaped injury and indignity at the hands of the powerful, very little moves me as deeply and matters as much as the suffering of innocent people around the world. As a citizen, I recognize my responsibility to join others in resisting these crimes committed in my name, whenever and however I can. And as a poet of conscience, I find them insistently surfacing in my writing as well.
"Yet I have never consciously set out to write a 'political poem.' Political poetry taps the same sources of inspiration and employs the same variety of form and technique that all poems do. Compassion, vision, prophecy, witness, and other forms of poetic imagination do not spring from the times we live in, from revolutionary theories of capital and labor, analyses of neocolonialism or class war, but from what persists from generation to generation in the heart and conscience of the individual. Political poetry is the human in me, responding to the human in those caught up in today's headlines, reaching out to the human in you.
"We live in a time when more than ever before, all of us are called to do what we can to defend the defenseless Earth and its innocents. Collectively, these poems illuminate the choice we face- and have always faced- now that we can no longer evade the necessity to choose. Is the United States of America a democracy, or is it an empire? Do we meekly turn around and go back to "Whites Only," blacklists and loyalty oaths, back-yard fallout shelters and back-alley abortions? Or do we press on across this latest bridge toward Dr. King's Beloved Community?"
Wing is the author of five previous books of poems, including "Wild Atlanta," a coffee-table book combining poems about Atlanta's many urban greenspaces and nature preserves with color photographs by Luz Wright. More recently he published "Washed in the Hurricane," a poet's-eye view of nature as wilderness, nature as human habitat, and the causes and consequences of climate change, which concludes with the essay "Earth Poetry: Reclaiming the Ecological Niche of the Poet." Wing lives in Atlanta, where he serves on the board of Nuclear Watch South and the Lake Claire Community Land Trust. He writes a monthly blog entitled "Wingtips." Sign up or learn more at StephenWing.com.
