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Nothing Enrages The Tyrant More Than Hope: The Poem as Witness.

The Wanda Barford Memorial Poetry Lecture delivered by Anne Michaels. ‘Every poem is a poem of witness. Every poem, a form of rescue – from amnesia of every sort, from every kind of disregard and indifference. The hope of poems that witness war and political oppression is the assertion of justice spoken, spit in the eye of the oppressor, a message left for the others. And poems witness tyrannies less visible – illness, grief, shame, regret, terror, error, doubt. And others still, witness love that cannot wait – an entire life passes in a moment. The poem says: precisely in the places where we feel most abandoned, we are not alone. No other public utterance so effectively names those places in us, and makes, in its precision, such ample space for both writer and reader. Here, the poem says, exactly in the place of dispossession – by a tyrant, by history, by a plan or policing, by chance, by time, by desire, by longing – exactly here and here and here, is the hope of being heard, and in that hope, solidarity. Every time we meet another’s gaze, here, in the poem, writer and reader, something is mended.’ – Anne Michaels This lecture is in memory of musician and poet, Wanda Barford.