Poetry Versus Propaganda: When a Poem Devolves Into Rhetoric

The difference between poetry and rhetoric
is being ready to kill
yourself
instead of your children.

—Audre Lorde, “Power”

Back in 2019, I was asked to review a book of poems by Steven Sher called Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies. Sher is a Brooklyn-born, Orthodox Jew who has been living in Jerusalem since 2012, and the poems in this book embody a profoundly nationalist, Orthodox Jewish commitment to Israel as the Jewish homeland. More than that, though, it is a book that demonizes the Palestinians and at least implicitly denies any claim they might have to the land as theirs. Sher’s politics when it comes to Israel, in other words—and this is how I put it in the review—are “precisely antithetical to my own.” This made the review difficult to write, not because I have a problem arguing against politics such as his, but because I wanted to make sure that when I called the book a failure overall, despite the presence of some truly beautiful and moving poems, I was talking about a failure within the poetry itself, not just my political disagreement with the author.

The review was published in the Summer 2022 issue of American Book Review, but I wrote it, obviously, before the eleven-day war that broke out between Israel and Hamas in May of 2021, before Israel’s Operation Breaking Dawn in 2022 (which targeted Islamic Jihad in Gaza), and before the current genocidal war that Israel has been waging in Gaza in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack on October 7, 2023. Looking back at Sher’s book now, it’s frightening how prophetic some of the poems have turned out to be, in particular “Bombing Gaza,” a cynical reworking of Abraham’s negotiation with God over the lives of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 18:23-32). Sher’s speaker in that poem bargains with a voice that has the power to decimate Gaza—God’s? The Israeli government’s?—for the lives of the people who live there. However, because we already know the outcome of the Biblical story—God ultimately destroys Sodom and Gomorrah—there is no way not to read into the poem the assertion that Gaza deserves to be destroyed in the same way and for the same reason, ie, that it would be impossible to find at least ten righteous people who live there. (If you’d like to read the review for yourself, you can do so here).

I started thinking about this book again because it happened to be at the top of a stack that I was moving from one place to another, and I was reminded of a poem from the book that I didn’t write about in my review, the one that opens the collection, “Looking East From Mt. Scopus.” In this poem, Sher’s speaker watches three Palestinian boys herding their goats towards home and bears witness as one of the boys, the oldest, who is “not yet a teen,” beats nearly, if not actually, to death the black goat he’s been carrying on his shoulders. Sher’s skill as a poet is apparent in the precise detail with which he conjures the scene:

From this overlook, we can see beyond Maale Adumim
to the Dead Sea and as far as Amman.
Between us and an Arab village, forms are moving
on the nearest hillside, long contested,
going shrub to shrub in search of sustenance
from land that seems to mock their hunger.
Later we come upon this small flock
with its young herders, the oldest not yet a teen
carrying a black goat on his shoulders.
Two younger boys encourage the flock to keep pace
as the trail narrows and they approach paved road.
Here the older boy beats each goat with his stick
till it leaps the metal rail. When he puts the black one down,
he beats it too and it doesn’t make a sound.

Instead of continuing in the mode of bearing witness, however, the next three lines offer a diagnosis of sorts:

I imagine his father beating him like this
and the boy never crying out, never revealing his pain
though it carves out his future in the stone that’s his heart.

It’s possible, of course, that the boy’s father does in fact beat him and that the boy responds in precisely the stoic manner the poem describes. However, because Sher-the-poet has his speaker make this speculative assumption without giving him any self-awareness that it is an assumption and that he himself is therefore implicated in where that assumption leads him, one has to assume that the poet shares the speaker’s perspective, that the speaker is a spokesperson for that perspective and, therefore, for the poet as well. The poem, in other words, becomes more propaganda than art. Here is the poem’s conclusion:

…Maybe the boy tells himself
that he will come back for [the goat] or maybe he won’t bother,
thinking it will be gone by then—things have a way
of disappearing in these hills—and he won’t
have to carry it ever again if luck is with him,
once he invents the incontestable lie.

The poem does not identify the boy as belonging to any specific group, but the metaphor comparing the black goat on the ground to a “torn prayer rug someone’s flung/from the back of a truck” clearly implies that he is—or that the speaker assumes he is—Muslim, which means it is safe for the reader to assume that the boy is Palestinian and to understand as well that the life of lying the speaker has invented for the boy represents what the speaker, and therefore the poet, thinks about Palestinians in general.

For me, the spiritual practice of writing poetry locates itself in the moment that the language in which I am immersed opens up into possibilities I neither predicted nor consciously desired and the corresponding decision I then have to make about whether or not to trust where that language will lead me. In “Looking East From Mt. Scopus”—and, I would argue, in much of Contestable Truths, Incontestable Lies—Sher was neither attuned to that moment nor willing to commit himself to that trust, which is why “Looking East From Mt. Scopus” closes down any reading that is not also a self-serving sociological analysis of the Palestinian family.

The poem fails, in other words, not only as a poem, but also as what I think Sher would like it to be, an (admittedly ironic) expression of his deep spiritual commitment to Israel as the Jewish homeland. In my review, I criticized Sher’s book for the way it politicized that commitment, weaponizing it against the Palestinians. What I’m interested in here is how the failure of this poem can be used as an object lesson in how not to write politically engaged poetry, unless of course you want what you write to be simply rhetoric, simply propaganda. At a time, when more and more poets are asking of ourselves and of our art a response that is adequate to the frighteningly and dangerously fraught political and cultural moment in which we live, that lesson is an important one to learn over and over again.

Cross-posted on Learning To Love The Questions.