Poets Writing History — Immediate Responses to the 2008 American Election

Poetry has played a prominent role throughout the course of the two-year campaign leading up to this year’s U.S. Presidential election (see our previous postings on the topic listed below), and since the election, many poets have been moved to write new poems, capturing the feel of this historic moment. Derek Walcott, the West Indies poet who won the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature “for a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment,” and whose Collected Poems was photographed in Barack Obama’s hand just a few days after he was elected President, has already written a poem for Obama that appeared in The London Times the day after the election: “Forty Acres.” Anny Ballardini’s Poets’ Corner at fieralingue has posted an ever-growing anthology of poems responding to the election: “While the He/art Pants,” curated by Nigerian poet, artist and English professor Obododimma Oha. And one of the stalwarts of our own About Poetry Forum, Guy Kettelhack, has written a delicately powerful evocation of the moment-to-moment waiting that is the actual experience of election day itself: “Selecting Precedents.”

Our previous posts about poetry in the 2008 election campaign:
The Intersection of Politics and Autobiography in Poetry, Obama’s poetry (March 2007)
Harold Bloom comments on Barack Obama’s poems (June 2007)
Poetry vs. Prose in the Presidential Campaign? (February 2008) — This one has a poll asking “Would you vote for a poet for President?” Stop in and see how our readers voted.
Barack Obama’s Poem Now a Video (July 2008)
Found Poetry on the Campaign Trail, Sarah Palin’s statements made into poetry by Hart Seely (October 2008)