In a month-long act of resistance, poets remind us that poetry can push back against forces that marginalize voices, erase stories, and impose control over how we live and imagine.
An interview with poet D.A. Lockhart
ALL LIT UP: How would you describe Commonwealth to someone picking it up for the first time?
D.A. LOCKHART: Commonwealth is a land-rooted poetic meditation on the natural world, loss, and the human necessity to move across the Earth without borders. And like my Lenape ancestors, the book carries songs and lyrics of praise, loss, and resilience in former Opeksipu homelands of the Lenape. The book itself carries the reader from the shores of Weli Sipu (Ohio River) north through the hollers, rivers, prairies, and cities of Indiana and Illinois. Hellbenders arise from buffalo traces and rivers like the Wabash and Sangamon pour past shared histories and futures. This is a book that declares love for a colonized and injured land. The reader is taken along on the migration through these lands and along the way, they are asked to engage with the languages and epistemologies that arose naturally from the land rather than the imported ones.
ALU: How do you see poetry as an act of resistance?
D.A.: Fundamentally, as an art form, poetry is about resistance. Possibly the most obvious case in our more contemporary world are the poets of Chinese Revolution. Chen Duxiu, Mao Zedong, and Zeng Chaolin are some of the most widely known poets who saw poetry as a galvanizing form of resistance. Although in their own right more “comfortably” Western poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Jim Daniels have pushed against notions of sexuality or labour. The craft resists the world as it is in many ways. As such, poetry is fundamentally resistance. And this nature stems from the fact that poets dwell in the realm of truth. And truth is generally an antagonist to power-wielders. We often say the impolite things. Things that offer possibilities beyond the structured world of defined and top-heavy power structures. But we speak them in beauty. And poetry does the critical thing in society, it inspires. Speaking truth, saying it beautifully, and igniting a spark of that beautiful truth within others is what makes poetry not only an act of resistance, it’s likely the most effective act of resistance. I might go as far to say that poetry that does not resist the world in failed poetry.
ALU: What role does community—readers, poets, teachers—play in your writing?
D.A.: Simply put, a massive role. I see writing as an act of communication across people and across generations. John Donne reminded us that no person is an island unto themselves. And if accept that poetry and writing is fundamentally an act of the individual psyche then the single factor that makes it successful is the manner in which it opens a “conversation” between psyches. Readers discover this. Teachers illustrate to their students. And just as one must be mindful in what they speak and what they leave out, the same applies poetry. This craft exist, like all of us, within a community context. From the moment of a poem’s inception in one’s own mind, I know that it must and it will eventually speak to readers, fellow poets, and teachers. And as a community act, this craft of poetry, requires all them to function. Teachers pass on the work of poets to readers that writers will never meet. Rarely do teachers and poets meet, like the poet and their readers. Yet the work binds them. Without the knowledge of poetry existing in community, writing becomes an act of narcissism, and fails its most basic task, communicating within the community.
Read “Blue Hole of Prairietown, Indiana“
from Commonwealth
Blue Hole of Prairietown, Indiana
Our time stretches from places
that divide waters, from murmurs
of service station men, back through
levee breaches, where crust fractures
and the waters run treasure state blue.
We place ourselves in relation
to water, admire the sun as it
bounces back, speak of that
which is lost to abysmal depths:
locomotives, lovers in a car,
playful children never returned.
Out of it too, rise warnings:
of hungry catfish, how outflow
wind turbine plate harmonics
poisons quietlike, the slow demise
of sweet cold water at the fringes
of our shared earth prophesize
that this kingdom of man ends
in fractured crust and shadow.
Perhaps mastodons fell in here.
As if this land received Tecumseh’s
comet, the pit from which Harrison
drew rage to slaughter Lenape women
and children. Above this Vigo County
roadside know that it is quiet, spare
for the rapturous blackbirds and rustle
of cardboard-thick tall grasses. Know
what we put in far outweighs the sight
of that which myth carries beyond here.
Reprinted with permission from Kegedonce Press.
Watch D.A. read from Commonwealth
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D.A. Lockhart is the author of multiple collections of poetry and short fiction. His work has been shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award, Raymond Souster Award, Indiana Author’s Awards, First Nations Communities READ Award, and has been a finalist for the ReLit Award. His work has appeared widely throughout Turtle Island, including in The Malahat Review, Grain, CV2, TriQuarterly, The Fiddlehead, ARC Poetry Magazine, Best Canadian Poetry, Best New Poetry from the Midwest, and Belt. Along the way his work has garnered numerous Pushcart Prize nominations, National Magazine Award nominations, and Best of the Net nominations. He is pùkuwànkoamimëns of the Moravian of the Thames First Nation (Eelūnaapèewii Lahkèewiit). Lockhart currently resides on the south shore at Waawiiyaatanong where he is the publisher at Urban Farmhouse Press.
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Thanks to D.A. for answering our questions, and to Kegedonce Press for the text of “Blue Hole of Prairietown, Indiana” from Commonwealth, which is available to purchase here on All Lit Up (and get 15% off + FREE shipping Canada-wide with the code POETSRESIST until April 30!).
Follow our NPM series all month long to discover new poetry or connect with old favourites, and visit our poetry shop here.
