PositiveOn the Seawall... seems to emerge out of the very middle of a life, from a vantage that sees death and catastrophe all around, is touched, knocked down, by trauma, yet persists, not in despondency or even anger but through a hardened resolve ... we can hear a poet attempting to make a pointed political statement that successfully navigates a larger chaos of interrelated anxieties. It is a stalwart act, and as I begin to reckon with those anxieties surrounding the foundational impulse of the poem, I start to read the last line differently, not as a hastily attached political signal but as a truer determination that these names will be named, despite of or through a wider confusion, as an act of political will. In an unexpected way, the conservative poetics help to enable this, giving the right dramatic/steadying pause before that last line, and perhaps, in a more theoretical way, reclaiming this traditional poetic meter with a necessary confrontation, a meaningful disobedience ... needed.
