The People Are Listening (5.25.21)

A story in the NYT today about how the poets of Myanmar are faring under the new dictatorship.  Spoiler alert: not well.  

Four have been murdered outright in the past several months, and a couple dozen have been locked up, all for sharing their poems online.  Granted, the poems are anti-junta, written in protest, but Myanmar's poets are not being silenced just for the content of their work.  No, they are being murdered and imprisoned for a more radical reason: 

The People Are Listening

And so they keep writing and posting and suffering.  

I am reminded of the poets of Russia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and other East European nations in the post-War years up until the collapse of the Soviet Union.  They too suffered for their writing, and they too had grand audiences.  The poet, Peter Meineke, once told me he'd read his poems in Poland--this would have been in the 70s--to crowds of as many as one thousand!  And not just on some campus in one town, but everywhere he went, people turned out.  I asked him what accounted for such numbers.  The Truth, he told me.  No one trusted state-run media; only poets and artists were trusted to speak the truth.  And since their work was censored by the state, precisely because it told the truth, it couldn't be published.  Meineke told me, "Imagine entire books of poems--my own poems, too!--run on mimeograph machines and handed out across the country."

Walt Whitman famously wrote that great poetry demands great audiences, and that America was destined to produce great poets for that reason: the audiences borne of Democracy were the greatest audiences the world would know.  I wish I could believe that today.  But I believe that tyranny makes for great audiences and so the poetry they thirst for.  Censoring the truth makes it truer and more precious . . . and more certain that the people will find a way to it.

The people are listening to the poets of Myanmar because they speak the only truth citizens are likely to hear right now.  And the poets are paying for it with their lives.