Consider: Obama hate poems (or any hate poems)

Several months ago, a judge ruled that a Kentucky man who wrote a poem in reference to President Obama, with a line reading “Die negro Die,” can be prosecuted for threatening the President. The poem, unsurprisingly enough, was posted on a white supremacist website. You can read a brief write-up on the case here.

My question is: Should the poem be bothersome? How does the title “Die Nigger Die” by H Rap Brown make readers – make people – feel? I know both phrases don’t inhabit the same intentions, but my issue with having an issue with the poem is the assumption that poetry is indebted to affirming (ostensible) moral conduct and propriety.

I don’t see poetry as didactic, or instructional, or capable of producing a message that can be retained or seen as relevant on a “personal” level. Those are the objectives of Scripture, religion, political groups and other kinds of advisory organizations. I do think poetry is to be taken seriously, but only insofar as it may be the subject of meditation, spiritual expression, interrogation, discovery – any kind of internal action and movement.

Poetry, to me, is not an impetus for external action. The “pen is mightier than the sword” because the pen will always bring people right back to themselves.

Poetry can only be a warehouse for poems along the lines of the “die negro dies.” It can only house the ugly, not incite it. If individuals can’t express their bigotry in a poem, how else would one rather they express it?

Poetry, in my estimation, has always been, is, and will always be a substitute for action, not a cause for it. Prosecuting scary poetry is, by implication, asking something of the art that it is not capable of providing: absolute security through the restatement of (ostensible) social values and standards.