The Poetry of Participatory Democracy

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. For our last 15 minutes this morning, as we await results from this apparently toss up presidential election, let's move past the polls and the ads and the yard signs and the buttons and reflect on voting and how lucky we are to be able to participate like this, something some of us got access to more recently in American history than others, right. We're joined for this once more by Steve Zeitlin and Bob Holman to hear some poems, stories, and maybe a few of your calls about when voting meant something special to you, maybe just this morning.

They were here in 2022, some of you may recall, as they started their project called All The Voices: Crossing the Great Divide, and they heard from so many of you at that time. They're back for this Election Day. Bob Holman is a poet, filmmaker, and proprietor of the Bowery Poetry Club. Joining us from the birthplace of democracy, you might call it Greece, is Steve Zeitlin, the founding director of City Lore and author of The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness. Hey, Steve. Hey, Bob. Welcome back to WNYC.

Bob Holman: Great to be here, Brian.

Steve Zeitlin: Thanks so much, Brian.

Bob Holman: What a day.

Brian Lehrer: What a day. I see you've added an S to the subtitle of your project. It's no longer Crossing the Great Divide, it's Crossing the Great Divides. Why that change?

Bob Holman: The more that we found the great divide, the more that we realized it had to divide itself.

Steve Zeitlin: After October 7th, we realized that it wasn't only a divide between Republicans and Democrats, but there were a series of divides. We ended up thinking that really the way to cross the great divide is realizing that there are many divides and that we wanted in our project not only to talk about what things are driving us apart, but also what is holding us together, and one of those things is voting.

We thought that discussing our voting experiences is something that we can be thankful for and pay our respects to voting itself as one of the ways of crossing the great divides and understanding what it means to be in a democratic society and have the honor of voting.

Brian Lehrer: Sometimes you collect responses from people around the country in prose, sometimes in poetry. We're going to play a clip, a sample from what you've collected of someone talking poetically about voting. Back when you were on in 2020, we heard a couple of the poems then. Here's another one from a video sampler that you put together. This is Ann Lanzolotto from the Bronx, as you will hear.

Ann Lanzolotto: I'm from the US Of A, from the Bronx, and our country's in a nosedive, and the only thing that could pull the nose up of this country is the vote, the sacred, sacrosanct vote. My mother drilled this into me when I was one years old. She took me into the voting booth with her every presidential election. It was the only place I saw her have agency, make a decision on her own, make a choice.

She voted against war, she voted for peace, and she taught me, when you vote in the United States of America, you have to think about millions of people all over the world that you'll never meet, but your vote for president affects their lives, affects who lives and dies, who has food and who doesn't. Affects everything.

Brian Lehrer: As the music comes back in in your sampler video, that's not a car driving by your window, folks, playing a loud bass. Bob, that's an excerpt from her poem where she goes on to tell taking an elderly neighbor to the polls who she knows is going to vote for Trump, but voting is sacred, so she helps her. That's some story.

Bob Holman: It's some story, Brian, and it really goes to the heart of the utopian ideas, the truth that poetry can bring out. We're looking for people to tell us where they're from politically, how they came to vote the way they do. If you get back to that kind of dialogue, then you have people talking to each other, and that's how you cross the great divide.

Brian Lehrer: Now, I see that y'all have arranged for somebody to call in who, if that caller was talking about her elderly neighbor who she took to the polls, we have the opposite number, I think a six-year-old who voted with her parent or accompanied her parent for the first time. Let's take a call right now from Vera here in New York City. Hey, Vera, are you there? Hi, Vera. I think Vera and Parent are on the line. Vera, can you hear me? Hi, it's Brian Lehrer on the radio.

Vera: Yes.

Brian Lehrer: Hi. Where do you live, Vera?

Vera: [inaudible 00:05:46] New York.

Brian Lehrer: I think Vera doesn't have a great connection. Did you go-- [crosstalk]

Bob Holman: Yes. It's too bad because she lives in Harlem. It's too bad we can't hear her there.

Brian Lehrer: Well, we'll keep giving her a try here. Did you go vote today? Did you go vote today? Did you accompany one of your parents to go vote today?

Vera: [inaudible 00:06:08]

Brian Lehrer: What was that like? We'll give her line one more chance. What was that like today? Oh, I guess it's not working out. Bob, I know this is somebody you know, so what do you think she was going to say?

Bob Holman: I met her on the street corner just a couple of days ago. Met the whole family walking back from the polls, Brian. It was really something because she immediately-- It was like she was a veteran of being in there. The joy that was coming out of her and the way that she felt that it was so great to be able to make this choice. She voted for somebody whose name starts with a K, but it turns out that the person whose name starts with a T at her school was a dirty word, so she wouldn't even say that name. It's democracy in action at six years old.

Brian Lehrer: How about that? Well, nice try. Anyway. Steve Zeitlin, you sent us another piece of tape that we'll play now. This one about all the good things that voting entails, but also its precariousness. This is a bit of Afghan immigrant Sahar Mohrati's reflections on voting in Afghanistan's first direct election of a president that hopeful day in October of 2004.

Sahar Mohrati: I remember because I was there. I was 25 years old at the time, living and working in Kabul, and I had the extraordinary privilege of casting my vote alongside some 10 million other registered voters. I remember the great excitement in the air and also the fear, the excitement of standing in these long lines with our brand new voter registration cards, and the real fear that the security situation was still very brittle. There was still ongoing fighting, and election workers were being threatened and polling sites were being attacked.

Brian Lehrer: Steve Zeitlin, that was 2004, that story that she was telling. Here it is 20 years later, she's here, and the Taliban is back in power there, so it's not a guarantee, this democracy that includes voting. Right?

Steve Zeitlin: That's exactly right. That's what makes that story so powerful, that it was such a fragile moment. [unintelligible 00:08:43]-- [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: Tell us-- Oh, go ahead. Go ahead. I know there's a little delay on your line because you're in Greece, but go ahead.

Steve Zeitlin: I mean, it just goes to show how fragile the right to vote is and really that something we take so much for granted and we see so much that divides between who we're voting for that we sometimes forget about the experience itself. We wanted to give people an opportunity to reminisce about some of the moments where they voted and it meant something special to them. We feel like that's a way of paying respect to the country itself and a way of crossing some of the great divides.

Brian Lehrer: I see the two of you have some favorite poems of your own about democracy. Bob, I want to give you a chance to read or recite from memory, if that's how you do it, because I know you've picked something out.

Bob Holman: Yes, I picked out a poem by Leonard Cohen. When I was filming The United States of Poetry, one of the rules was that you had to be from the United States, but somehow Leonard Cohen crossed the line when he wrote his poem Democracy, which ends like this.

"It's coming to America first, the cradle of the best and of the worst. It's here they got the range and the machinery for change and it's here they got the spiritual thirst. It's here the family's broken and it's here the lonely say that the heart has got to open in a fundamental way: Democracy is coming to the USA. I'm sentimental if you know what I mean: I love the country but I can't stand the scene. And I'm neither left nor right, I'm just staying home tonight, getting lost in that hopeless little screen. But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags that time cannot decay, I'm junk but I'm still holding up this little wild bouquet: Democracy is coming to the USA."

Brian Lehrer: When we say that some of our singer-songwriters are also poets, certainly true in Leonard Cohen's case. Do you know when that was written?

Bob Holman: Oh, wow, that's a good question. I think it was back in the '80s. Cohen was a poet before he was a singer-songwriter and always has had a position in the crazy world of poetry. Right now when he's saying democracy is coming to the USA, this is the first time I've ever thought about maybe democracy is leaving the USA, and that poem becomes even more poignant. We're looking for people to write into us, Brian.

They can write into poetry@citylore.org and tell us their stories about democracy coming, going, but what the experience of voting and being a participant as a citizen in the country is all about. You write it in prose or poetry. It doesn't really matter. Where are the voices, and is democracy coming or going from the USA?

Brian Lehrer: Steve, did you also have a poem in mind to read or just some reflections on-- [crosstalk]

Steve Zeitlin: I think Bob has another one that we think is pretty great, but we really do hope that for the anthology we're working on that people write to us at poetry@citylore.org. Bob, do you want to read the Straker poem?

Bob Holman: Yes, sure. I wish that Dorian Straker was here. He's a Bajan from Barbados, came over in 1967. I'm going to do my best to read it. He's okay with this.

Brian Lehrer: Let me say that I know this is a longer poem and we're not going to have time for the whole thing, but give us about 45 seconds and we'll take that as an excerpt.

Bob Holman: You've got it. "I'm from an island steeped in traditions to fill the coffers of rich white men in far off lands. I come from the struggle of a people denied the vote, denied access to opportunity. I was told to keep my head down, stay out of trouble, avoid any protests that could send me back before I got a shot at the American dream. I read and learned the history not taught in my schools on that small island I'm from. Went to college, found a job, bided my time to citizenship, to voting again. I'm told this is the best way to make my voice heard at the ballot box, but is it? The arc is bending too slowly toward justice, but still I vote."

Brian Lehrer: Bob Holman and Steve Zeitlin, you're invited to participate in their ongoing project, All the Voices: Crossing the Great Divides. Steve, tell people again how to do that.

Steve Zeitlin: They can write to us at poetry@citylore.org, C-I-T-Y-L-O-R-E, dot, O-R-G.

Brian Lehrer: Thanks, both of you, for coming on and adding a little poetry to this Election Day.

Bob Holman: Thanks, Brian.

Steve Zeitlin: Thanks so much, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. That's our election morning show. Hang in there, everybody. Election night coverage begins at 7:00 this evening on WNYC, and we'll be back tomorrow morning at 10:00 for who knows what. Stay tuned for Alison.

 

 

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