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Poster poems: politics

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As bruising electoral battles rage on around us, it’s a good time to remember that poets can raise their voices for public causes, too. Please add your voice below

In the US, the electorate braces itself for what may be the nastiest and most bizarre presidential election in living memory. The Brexit referendum in the UK has taken on the characteristics of high (or low) farce. Meanwhile, here in Ireland, a centrist party that won less than a third of the total seats in the March general election is trying to cobble together some kind of minority government with the tacit support of another centrist party that refuses to enter coalition as junior partners. If there was ever a time for a politics-themed Poster poems, this is it.

Matters political of one sort or another have exercised the minds of poets in various ways down the ages. At times, the poems they produced have been pithy and epigrammatic, like EE Cummings’s A Politician– possibly the most succinct political put-down in the history of the art – or Langston Hughes’s prophecy of change in Black Workers.

Related: What's poetry's role in protest politics?

Related: Political poetry with Luke Wright and Hollie McNish – books podcast

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