on writing & rioting
two poems made me think differently about the struggle for liberation--and for artistic satisfaction.
As an American writer and organizer, I’ve been chewing on lines from two different poems for the past few months:
“Every poet is a failed revolutionary” – Omar Sakr, from the poem “Regards”
“Work [writing] is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.” – Marge Piercy, from the poem “For the young who want to”
I like these lines in conversation with each other because they raise questions of why we write and what our political and artistic efforts really amount to. They also invite comparisons between the organizer and the writer, which in this piece I alternatingly think of as separate and blended.
When I read the Sakr quote and the next few words of that line—“and it’s so embarrassing”—it forces me to stop vibrating with earnestness and just sit with the facts: I have not succeeded in upending a poisonous capitalist war machine, with or without my comrades. While I may have helped educate and radicalize people along the way, the truth is that the machine still glugs blood. Critically, the concept of the “failed revolutionary” highlights the futility of the individual organizer. I feel the shame of this language specifically: I, Lauren, am a poet because my revolutionary politics have not been enough.
Writers are also people who take the shame of “failed” projects personally, and our collective tendency toward seclusion aggravates this likelihood. A robust writing practice suggests a turning away from the myriad evils of our environment to participate in what may look like a masturbatory exercise in self-betterment. At worst, the writer looks like she’s trying to prescribe solutions to a problem she doesn’t understand because she doesn’t spend any time engaging with people whose realities differ from her own. A worst-case scenario occurs when the writer thinks she leads the revolution through her writing—which she almost certainly does not. In Sakr’s language: “I am in all the way in the way trying to fit my mouth over death.”
Sometimes I think about the need to write while the world burns as a kind of muscle jerk, a physiological reaction to being hooked up to the murder machine. (I could also spend a lot of time looking at the nature of those connections I have as a white woman to the machine, compared to any number of other people in the world). There are plenty of metaphors elucidating this relationship of person creating meaning alongside the vortex of death, each with differing levels of futility—the Titanic orchestra, whistling in the dark, the line “We’re all just walking each other home”. A writer is a silly person who needs to comfort herself and make sense of her world by talking on the page, sometimes at length, with no real solution necessarily in sight, often to or with her community.
This is the opposite of an organized collective response to political injustice, where we are many, and un-self-focused, doing less talking and more directly plugging into wherever our work is needed to stop someone’s bleeding. A swift movement unhampered by squishy self-doubt and metaphor can heal wounds, feed neighbors, bag down an evil company with enough bad press to make them quit town. The best form of collective action happens when activists force police to release people and vacate a neighborhood. You can’t put your body on the line like that when you’re yammering about political theory on your laptop, like I’m doing here.
Still I keep writing!
So then I turn to Piercy’s words: “You have to like it better than being loved.” It’s a heavy line at the end of a heavy poem about struggling for validation as a writer, where “Beforehand [before publication] what you have is a tedious delusion, a hobby like knitting.” Both Piercy and Sakr are onto something: writing is humiliating. You put on an elaborate show for the world, which is picking its nose, while someone, somewhere, suffers a slow and hideous death. If the writer is American, she is more likely than not subsidizing that death. The writer, in adopting politics of waging struggle against empire, risks buttering herself up with thoughts of pen-is-mightier-than-the-sword-flavored delusion about speaking truth to power and using the heat of language to burn the machine to ash. It doesn’t work like that in 2025 America. There are legacies of writers standing up to regimes, usually in more direct and antagonistic ways than are really relevant or possible under late capitalism. As long as you clock in for your shift and keep your mouth shut on the job, often no one is too bothered by your words. (Yet.)
This is a hollow relief—how can my writing threaten capitalism and the power-hungry, morally deceased politicians of this country if they aren’t bothered by my words? What is the point of advocating verbally for struggle against the many insidious and murderous forms of empire?
Furthermore, to interpret Piercy’s words more personally—to like something better than being loved? Do I like anything better than that? Reading this line feels like peering into a dark gallery of statues I’ve sculpted, alone.
Maybe it’s that writing provides an important contrast from the intensely socially collaborative process of thoughtful organizing. It opens a space to which we can withdraw and review not only the actions and choices of our movements, but our very morals themselves. Without the logistics-heavy noise of activism (“Can you bring water tonight? Who vetted this person and do they have car access? Can you afford to get arrested today?”), writing offers a place to become more grounded in why we believe what we do and how we plan to fight for it. I think most importantly, a struggle against empire necessitates quiet reflection so that quiet reflection does not take the place of struggle against empire.
Writing is not the revolution, but it gives me a pillow to rest my head on so that I’m clear-headed for a revolution when we invite it in—maybe with our words, but assuredly with our actions.