KIRPAL GORDON: Every day of this present administration recalls memories of Chicago '68, Civil Rights, Kent State and anti-Nam demonstrations. With the killing of Renee Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis, I’m stunned. Jim, you have been involved in a unique form of poetry activism. I am referring to your own poetry as well as your curation and scholarship of Museum of American Poetics which celebrates poetry from across the world, across genres, across decades. What can poets do in response to her murder? And Bill, you have been a poetry activist and scholar from your time in San Francisco in the late Sixties to now. What advice on right action do you glean from our poetry tradition in responding to the ruptures in our democracy?
JIM COHN: For myself, a person who generally refrains from using social media to express my own personal views on politics, the maniacal death by an ICE agent of Renee Nicole Good, with three close range bullets shot to her head, a Minneapolis poet and mother of three, and a US citizen, was a moment when I felt no choice but to see the current United States government acting in its own interest, with its own secret police, accountable to no citizen, and no laws, save the president's whims.
I also realized, in doing so, the common enough experience that a person will be shaken enough, at certain times or over certain events, to take such action as social media provides in self-expression. What is usually not discussed when taking to social media is one's motivation for so doing. For me, the murder of a community activist & poet by ICE in January 2026 exploited tactics I never thought I'd see on America's streets; tactics in which I felt the terror of a shock and awe domestic paramilitary force armed & acting with impunity roaming at will across our cities and neighborhoods, armed federal agents engaged in extreme lawlessness, violence & lack of concern for their fellow citizens.
What came over me was an utter sense of isolation that I felt in the face of this tragic incident. The heart of this feeling was the recognition of a shared identity with the victim through poetry and through the artistic vocation of the poet. Each time ICE agents detain, incarcerate, deport, and/or kill without any legal accountability within the domestic borders of the United States, each of us is less protected by the laws of our democracy. This feeling was not the result of any unacknowledged or acknowledged right or endowment upon a poet of any greater sense of freedom, including freedom of speech, and by no means limited only to that freedom, than to any other citizen, but an acknowledgment of others, and in that acknowledgment of the multiplicity of otherness as the history of this nation, its grand design by our founders, and the long march of freedom across the generations. We cannot allow for the federal government's projection that heavily armed & poorly trained ICE agents are in any greater need or right to protection from the domestic terrorism that they, not citizens, are waging on Americans of all walks of life as well as immigrants here legally and/or awaiting hearings on their immigration status.
As a result, I've written Colorado's governor's chief of staff requesting he invite & choose a
diverse group of Colorado poets to read poems in honor of Renee Nicole Good & in her
memory & against ICE's tactics and complete lack of accountability in the victimizing of
communities they invade. Such requests might also be done on the city level in conjunction with mayor offices.
These Readings would be part of the growing anti-ICE non-violent protests sweeping the nation.
WILLIAM SEATON: I certainly agree with you about the ugliness of the current regime and the need for all to combat it. I have always tried to do my part in demonstrations and organizing to try to further progressive movements: civil rights, anti-imperialism, feminism, labor, socialism. At times poetry has played a role. I attended what I think was the first poetry reading against the Vietnam War (December, 1967, Minneapolis) and I organized one myself when Bush invaded Iraq. My poems appear in half a dozen righteous politically-oriented anthologies. Etc.
Yet I see the duties of a good citizen, indeed of any moral person, as separate from the aesthetic goals of an artist. To me art is the work of making beautiful objects and politics the arena to construct ways of effectively cooperating. Both are important, but they acknowledge different value systems. People may have backward social views while producing great art and, on the other hand, they may espouse progressive views and produce nothing of aesthetic value to others. See my essay “Marxism’s Limits”.
Just as one might be a skilled heart surgeon while being nasty to a partner, not every great painter or poet expresses love of community. I don’t mean to discount the tradition of poets as seers, as collective voices (like Whitman consciously assuming the mantle of American prophet or Shelley speaking of “unacknowledged legislators”), and I continue to evaluate the character (though not the poetic achievement) of writers by their politics. Everyone has multiple roles, and a poet is also a citizen with civic responsibilities and a human with moral obligations to others.
Poetry excels in ambiguity, mystery, ambivalence, and self-contradiction. Propaganda, while it may well be true and even sometimes beautiful as well, tends toward reductive simplicity. Shelley’s “England in 1819” is an example of agitprop that is at the same time most artful. Art can assist the people’s movements with persuasive speeches, songs, and posters, yes, even poetry, and in this way be the handmaiden of positive change, and a good person will manifest that goodness through concern for the community, but art works cannot be judged by non-aesthetic criteria. As Trotsky said in Literature and Revolution, we can have no idea of socialist poetry since we do not live under socialism. Let each artist be guided by imagination, and we will see what we come up with.
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