Melissa Tuckey is a poet and activist involved in DC Poets Against the War.
E. Ethelbert Miller: How has the “language of war” influenced your writing?
Melissa Tuckey: If anything the war has made me more passionate about the importance of poetry, for its power of engaging heart and mind, and for the way it speaks truth to power and encourages readers to acknowledge and appreciate the complexities of truth. The language of war has made me leery of simplistic thinking and dichotomies like “good versus evil” or “us versus them.” In my writing I try to remember that I am complicit in this world. Even though I oppose the war, I am a part of it, it is not separate from me. Likewise the language of war has made me leery of abstractions like “freedom.” I want precise, personal, accountable language and experience.
E. Ethelbert Miller: We often talk about the content of political poetry but what about form? Has the form of your work changed since the war started?
Melissa Tuckey: The image and the lyric are the way I respond to politics. This is something I've been thinking about for awhile and I don't think the war has changed it. As an activist I was confronted with emotion I didn't know how to process and with a complexity of experience that didn't translate into grant proposals, so I turned to poetry. For example, I went on an environmental justice tour in Louisiana and felt profoundly moved by what I witnessed and I continue to be disturbed by it. I struggled for years to find the language to describe what I saw and the way it worked itself into poetry is in fragmented images “that's not thunder … (those are) trains filled with toxic waste bumping into one another … men selling melons the size of heads … gambling boats ghost fishing on Lake Charles …”
Lyric poems tend to be brief and have the ability to tie disparate things together. They also tend to be emotive and personal. I find that a useful form for political work. I am also interested in silence in my poems, the exchange between reader and writer that occurs in poetry.
E. Ethelbert Miller: Why should a poet make political posters or march in a demonstration? Why have you done it?
Melissa Tuckey: Poets, of all people, belong at protests. In so many countries, poets have been criminalized, silenced, jailed. We cannot do our work without freedom of expression. I can't imagine living in a country where it's a crime to speak the truth. I see protests as a means to protect our rights—it's an expression of our collective power. The U.S. media makes us feel insignificant by giving very little air space to protests, but if you look at history, everything good about this country came as a result of protest. The right to an eight-hour day, the right to vote, the right to organize unions and demand fair wages, civil rights, the minimum wage, reproductive health care, all these things and more came about as a result of direct action and protest. When the government is going the wrong direction, as it is in Iraq, we have an obligation to protest.
E. Ethelbert Miller: How is the poetry you're writing now different from what you wrote at George Mason University?
Melissa Tuckey: That's a difficult question and probably one I can't answer honestly. I really don't have enough distance from my poems to see how they've changed. I know that my writing process has changed. Now that I'm no longer in weekly workshops, I am working at a more natural pace and I'm in less of a hurry to reach the end of a poem. I get to be alone with my poems longer. I think this gives me greater flexibility in my writing.
E. Ethelbert Miller: It seems as if Katrina has now become a metaphor in our language. What about Iraq?
Melissa Tuckey: I think Iraq is a metaphor for the results of cultural arrogance and simplistic thinking. It's a message to would-be imperialists that this is no longer the 20th century. The people of Iraq are post-colonial. We have to find a new way of doing commerce, one that doesn't involve war. We have to find a new way of solving problems. The planet demands this. I hope one day Iraq will be a metaphor for how to fix what is broken and how to heal our planet. As Albert Einstein once said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” The conflict in Iraq is a symbol for an old way of thinking.
Melissa Tuckey is a poet and activist involved in DC Poets Against the War. E. Ethelbert Miller is an award-winning poet, the director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University, and the board chairperson of the Institute for Policy Studies. His interviews are a regular feature of Fiesta.
