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Poet Jennifer Moxley

Jennifer Moxley Poetry Reading
With G.E. Patterson. 4 p.m., April 23. Beinecke Library, 121 Wall St., New Haven; (203) 432-2977, beineckepoetry.wordpress.com.

Walt Whitman was large, contained multitudes and contradicted himself. By the 1960s, few American poets did what he did. The universal subject ("I") was considered a vestige of an old imperial power structure, so Whitman's "I" was no longer democratic and egalitarian but instead a symbol of white dominance in an oppressive culture. Perhaps the only redemption for Whitman came from new evidence suggesting he was gay.

Too simple? Sure, but that's more or less what happened, says poet Jennifer Moxley.

"You had to write from your particular social marker and not beyond that," says the University of Maine English professor in a phone interview. "The 1960s saw poetry emerge from identity politics and from politics put into lifestyle choices."

She now specializes in those social markers, teaching classes in gay and lesbian literature, feminist literary theory and women's studies. She's found her own way in volumes of poetry like her latest, Clampdown. In it, one can sense the poet pushing back against a kind of sealed off and self-referential thinking.

"Life is untenable without a universal subject," says Moxley. "At some point, we fracture into shards of self-interest. There's no reason I should write and read about only things related to me — a white woman from California. You want to grow and change and take risks. Otherwise, your life is the only life. That's not good. It should be a political thing."

It is, indeed, a political thing if by "political" we mean how we might best live together as a society. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote in Cultivating Humanity that the arts foster a "sympathetic imagination," which she says can "cultivate capacities of judgment and sensitivity that can and should be expressed in the choices a citizen makes."

Moxley knows all about political poetry. She was asked to be the poetry editor of the political and cultural criticism magazine The Baffler by its founder and editor Thomas Frank, who is best known for writing What's the Matter with Kansas? The book persuasively argued that voters, swayed by the intangible forces of the culture wars, vote against their own economic interests.

Frank is also a big fan of the Old Left, which used to fight for the working classes. When Moxley offered a series of radical political poems from the 1930s, Frank loved it. She's been a part of the infrequent publication of The Baffler ever since.

And while she doesn't think of herself as a political poet, she knows she can't get away from politics. Take her poem "The Occasion." In it, a group of poets and writers and all-round smart people talk about the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the Iraq war. Even if one is not particularly given to political discussion, "The Occasion" argues that people have little choice but to reckon with political realities. Events such as Sept. 11 influence how one expresses love of country or dissent from the political majority, for instance, and when to express it and to whom.

"For a while, there was no place to express doubt," Moxley says. "Not freely anyway."

That's why she chose to set the poem, and the discussion within, in someone's house. The public arena, she says, wasn't safe, because the fear and anxiety that many Americans felt after the attacks seemed to shoehorn people's opinions one way or another. In the confines of a domestic setting, Moxley says, voices could be freely heard.

"So it's not explicitly political, but it implies a political position," she says. "You can take the poetry out of politics, but you can't take the politics out of poetry."

Either way, one thing's for sure: Moxley isn't just singing songs of herself.