Mud, Poetry and Political Imagination

Photo by Nick Fewings

The poets (by which I mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us. Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only poets.

– James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity”

“Poetry can break open locked chambers of possibility, restore numbed zones to feeling, recharge desire.”

– Adrienne Rich, “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics

This thinking about the politics of mud started in Clamour...