Post-Election Poetry

In a piece at Wired, Lexi Pandell considers the role poetry plays in processing traumatic situations and how events in 2016 have given poetry renewed interest. And one of those events is the the recent Presidential election.

She writes:

In the 48 hours following the election, Poets.org also saw its biggest surge of shares in four years. Over a two-day span, the site typically sees 80-100 people tweeting links to its poems, and about 70-100 retweeting those links. On November 8 and 9, though more than 550 people tweeted out poems with 720 people retweeting those links. 

The top poems on the site since then have been Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise,” a declaration of selfhood about blacks rising against white oppression (read more than 50,000 times); Langston Hughes’s poem on the American dream, “Let America Be America Again” (35,000 times); and W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939” about the beginning of WWII (close to 25,000 times).