Politics and the Poetic Language: A Review of Mike Maggio’s DeMOCKracy

Plain View Press, 2007
Paperback. 80 pgs.
Review by Danika Stegeman

Like many college campuses, mine featured several corners stationed with flier-peddling, open-air evangelists. John, Mark, Luke, Revelations…all were there with open arms, whether I wanted the arms or not. One day I’d had enough. As a young man handed me a flier I looked directly into his enlightened blue eyes and crammed his Word into my mouth with my index finger. The gesture was symbolic. “If I wanted your rhetoric crammed down my throat,” my eyes told the man, “I could do it my damn self and do it with more style.”

I am usually reminded of that scene when I read overtly political poetry. “If I wanted your rhetoric crammed down my throat…” It is a scene I had in mind while preparing to write this review of Mike Maggio’s new collection DeMOCKracy. I read the title and braced myself for cramming.

I was not mistaken, to do so, exactly. The book’s intentions and content are as clear as their title; they are political, satirical, and experimental. In fact, they are shamelessly so. The poem “oanly in am- erica” is an example of all three ingredients. Maggio writes:

“oanly in am-
erica

lief
as
nvr
b4
scene

dth
in
lvng
klr

real’ty
s t r e t c h e d
a cross
yr
screem”

The liberal politics behind the poem are not masked by the experimentation with language, as might be expected. Instead the politics are made more glaring by way of the attention the language calls to itself. The poems that do not employ experimentation to these ends are no less politically oblique. Repetition is often used to great effect— to far better effect, I would argue, than the misspelling and visual word games, because the repetition also often contributes to the poem lyrically—in poems like “Collateral Damage” to draw attention to the political: “(we regret the loss of)/civilian casualties/(we regret the loss)/ of innocent bystanders/(we regret the)/loss of independent observers.”

Maggio wears his politics so much on his shirt-front, part of me wanted to get annoyed. I was being evangelized. Again. A few lines I read in the poem “Flag Burning,” however, made me reconsider where the cramming of rhetoric begins and ends. Towards the end of the poem, Maggio addresses the U.S. government and its machinations, writing “here’s my reply to your two-tongued promises/here’s my response to your soft, serpent lies/here’s my answer to the threats you propagate.”

In these lines, I recognized that neither Maggio, nor any other political poet, is the originating evangelist. This is not the first rant; it is a response. It is a response to a rant given each day by our government and media and their resultant culture. When approaching the book, the overt placement of the word “MOCK” in the title should not be ignored. Maggio turns on what he sees as his own open-air evangelist—the government, war, racism, classism, etc.—and uses the evangelist’s own phraseology (“corp/ O-rate/ merger,” “We fully believe/ in our/ (White)/ people” “Uknighted Stakes of Amerika/ & its affiliate Ltd.”) and in some cases visual tactics (some graphs and other visual poetic exercises also appear in the book) to create an unflinching political satire.

While I cannot say that I am convinced of the effectiveness or worth in shouting back at one’s adversaries, Maggio does come across as quite honest in the diction of his lines, which is more than I can say for the demockracy he rails against. The book has its strongest moments, in fact, in its most honest attempts—poems like “Raw Footage,” “Paper Cranes,” and “After the Beheading” which evoke more of an “I” speaker than a “we” speaker or a persona.

Though at times the overt politics in the poem still make me uncomfortable—
particularly when Maggio invokes a voice he perhaps has no right to, such as the immigrant worker/the homeless in “Alienation Blues” or African Americans in some of the “Notice” poems—I must consider that discomfort may be called for in the present political climate. Is it most effective to display anger in earnest in poetry or is it better to mask the anger in clever metaphor so that the “good ole poets’ club” can boast exclusive understanding and the right to wink at one another about it? Or is it preferable to ignore the problem entirely and write about flowers? I cannot answer these questions here, or perhaps ever. Mike Maggio, it seems, has answered it for himself and stands firmly by that answer in his poems.

***

Danika Stegeman is studying poetry in her second-year at George Mason University and is the assistant poetry editor for Phoebe. Her work has appeared in The Denver Quarterly and is forthcoming in The Cimarron Review.