Political Poetry in Fredericton

Jenna Lyn Albert

There is a controversy in Fredericton over the city’s poet laureate, Jenna Lyn Albert. She recited to city council a poem describing an abortion. Some councillors found it too political.

The poet laureate herself admits it was political in intent:

“With the impending closure of Clinic 554 … I felt it was really important to share a poem about the importance of abortion access."

She is also quoted as saying “Poetry is inherently political. It would be lacklustre if you were to take that aspect out of creativity and of the art form away from it."

She is wrong to say that poetry is inherently political. Take the example of Leonard Cohen, Canada’s preeminent poet. Does anyone really know his politics? Or take Shakespeare. Perhaps in his superheated environment, he did not find it safe to reveal his political opinions. Regardless, he managed to produce a respectable body of work.

What are the politics of Al Purdy’s “The Country North of Belleville”?

Can you cite a famous poem that is overtly political? Perhaps Yeats’ “Easter 1916”; but only in the sense that it refers to a political event. In the poem, Yeats’s own opinion on the event is ambiguous.

Poetry surely has the right to express political opinions. It is just not a good idea. Poetry is an attempt to speak of truth and the eternal. Political issues are transitory and about power. They are more or less incompatible. Write a political poem, and it is probably not going to be that successful; and not likely to endure.

We have, moreover, an endemic problem in Canada currently, that poetry and the arts in general have been coopted for political purposes by one side of the political debate, the left. It is difficult to imagine a strongly anti-abortion poem being read in Fredericton City Hall; or published in any major poetry journal. This one-sidedness is poisonous to our political discourse, and poisonous to art. It is probably largely why the general public has lost in poetry. It is no longer very good. It has not just that poets rise within the craft not for ability, but for espousing the right opinions. It is also that the poems they produce become predictable, repetitious, and without new insight. As Orwell has aptly explained in “Politics and the English Language,” political sloganeering is the opposite of insight.

Moreover, it seems obvious that a poet laureate does not have the right to express partisan political positions in that official capacity. Even if poorly paid, the poet laureate is on the public purse: he or she is an unelected public official. It is therefore improper for him or her to express opinions on political issues of the day just as it would be for the Governor-General, a Lieutenant-Governor, or for any other public servant.

The poem was pretty weak, too.