Ideas, language, action: The protest poetry of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter

Abstract

The notion of poetry as protest is not new – Percy Bysshe Shelley famously advocated for radical social action in ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ (1819), for example, a response to the brutality of the Peterloo massacre. Far from making nothing happen, Audre Lorde notes that ‘poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought’; the form ‘is not a luxury’ but a ‘vital necessity’ from which ideas, language, and action might be wrought (1985). Certainly, in the context of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter, poetry has occupied a central role in the expression of trauma and injustice, offering a critical means through which to speak truth to power, particularly from the margins, and via non-traditional publishing platforms such as Twitter and Instagram. This article argues that much of the protest poetry of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter activism operates in two key intersecting ways: as a transgressive variation of contemporary (anti-)elegy, and as a virtual performance drawing upon the network-building functions of social media. In both capacities, it is a form which resists the consolations of closure to demonstrate the ongoing social realities of systemic racism and sexism. Focussing on a range of poems which enact resistance, this article explores the ‘boundary-breaking potential’ of the elegiac performances of protest poetry, in which the ‘possibilities of a more equitable what could be take shape’ (Rutter et al., 2019, p. 24).