Poetry & Planet, Week One: Editor’s Note

“-such pain-/anger and fear for this america and/unable to comprehend these robots who masquerade/as men and/me-useless-” Ericka Huggins says in “Reflections on 3 March 1971.” Written from Niantic Prison in Connecticut about the trial of fellow Black Panther Party member Bobby Seale, her words still let feeling into and out of spaces—of courtrooms and cell blocks—designed to distort, deny and prohibit them. Over half a century later, the way they deeply humanize her own experience illuminates our present crux.

The image of “robots who masquerade as men” echoes Hannah Arendt’s observation that “the essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery of men, and thus to dehumanize them.” Against these forces that destroy both lives and truth, Arendt put her hopes, curiously, in a kind of thinking–“with the body and the soul”—that “gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down.”

I bring to these first five days of April, 2025, the belief that the chips are well and truly down, and that poetry does the thinking that Arendt called for. Poetry orients the reader to the roots of a plural reality where time is both linear and circular, in geographies saturated with histories and cosmologies. By this compassing it dismantles the dehumanization that oppressive systems require to function, and require of their functionaries, by activating our deep capacities for embodied connection.   

In rooting liberation as a possible future, I start with the late Peruvian poet and journalist Teresa Orbegoso, who fought and talked with her cancer until January 23, 2025. Her long poem on illness enfolds the scars and circulatory systems of the Americas, its gods of healing and injuring. Against the voracity of racial capitalism whose drive to accumulate by dispossession makes all lives disposable and worthless, she invokes a catholic re-sacralizing of existence.

The work of Lebanese-American poet Ruth Awad sustains ligatures of care and memory from east to west, the American Midwest to Tripoli, Lebanon, at the confluence of languages, losses, diasporas and borders. In its vehement un-estrangement, it pulses against the militarized theaters of detainment and deportation and the scapegoating of the undocumented and the noncompliant.

Ericka Huggins’ words make presente her sister loves, her comrades in and out of prison, invoking and blessing their survival and care and inventing new, more capacious names for how she loved and was loved by them. This heart-full play sustains their shared humanity, not just by breaking down barriers of binaries of hegemonic taxonomy, but by including and honoring their multiplicities of being for one another. 

Sicilian poet Jolanda Insana’s hot slaps of language wake the newborn’s cry inside the stuffy stentorian pomp of Latinate formalities. Deeply scathing as street talk must needs be, it curses patriarchy—what Judith Herman calls humans’ most durable form of tyranny—while mocking its perps. Down-to-earth, matter-of-fact, its radical yawps are a summons to speak truth, eat well, and laugh hard at the stuck-up fools trying to step on poor folks’ necks.

I close with the work of Puerto Rican poet Mariposa Fernández because it hits close to home for me, and brings the currents of embodied connection and healing full circle. It shows the Bronx as a site of intergenerational, diasporic resistance and transformation, where the children of parents who fought a fierce war on the poverty of a whitewashing, monolingual education system grew up to fight for their loved ones to be healed, not killed, by the public healthcare system. And it shows indigenous peoples leading the resistance to colonialism’s for-profit assault on our planet’s life, in which all our survivals are conjoined: “wounded water on/war torn terra tierra and terror/mingle in the chromosomes/of an entire population.”

These are not immaterial or abstract questions. They live in our mortal bodies whose needs for clean air and clean water are in competition with the machines we invented to extract more resources and profits from the earth. And the machines are thirsty too. Every time ChatGPT writes a 100-word email, its servers drink an Evian bottle’s worth of water. To the extent this heist is normalized, it is suicidal ideation on a global scale. Neuropsychology talks about “automatic voices,” messages that people internalize from their home environments and replicate in their attempts to survive. Part of healing, then, is decolonizing the psyche: disentangling it from the harmful programing of systems it was conditioned to perpetuate and freeing us to become more fully human.

As Palestinian-American poet Hala Alyan wrote four months into the ongoing genocide in Gaza, “Dehumanization works by shutting down curiosity and imagination. What we cannot imagine we cannot create or prevent. These are the stakes of imagining liberation that doesn’t come at the cost of someone else’s, imagining land and resources as something to steward not possess, imagining systems that heed truth and accountability.”

The work of these five poets stands against the dispossession of our imaginations and lives by the machinations of power. It does so by standing against the dehumanization of self and other. In holding this ground of imagination as abundantly life-giving, in rooting it in a shared sense of belonging, it remembers that liberty too is not just an abstract concept, but an old name for a commons: a plot of land tended together by everyone who lives on and from it. This earth month, dear reader, I hope this fruit of that ground stays and sustains and strengthens you for the seasons to come.