According to Plato, “Poetry is nearer the truth than history.”
It is with this appreciation that Dr. Priscilla Meddaugh reads a collection of her verse . . . poetry that focuses on the power, rather than the poetics, of the spoken word. Dr. Meddaugh’s scholarship examines the power of language and the realities that it can create, as well as chasms in knowledge that the double ness of language exploits. Her primary research investigates the rhetoric of contemporary white supremacy, and the epistemological dangers of such discourse in the modern America.
Conversely, however, Dr. Meddaugh is fascinated with channels of expression that liberate the oppressed. Like the other arts such as dance, rap, and film, poetry gives “voice” to those people who have been marginalized for hundreds of years. Dr. Meddaugh sees poetry as a discursive formation in which these oppressed voices can record their own unique experience
of history. If language does create reality, as many rhetoricians believe, than poetry provides alternative dimensions of knowledge of the silenced voice, giving us a much richer, fuller experience of the human condition.
III.
Nothing left to give, he fears
who will fill the hall of souls?
“Not I,” he claims, “hold nothing dear,
cannot spin trust from steel to gold.
Who will grow the ivory fields
lay smeared with vacant greed of man?
Protruding bones of last dawn’s yield…
a desperate gasp from anxious hands.
Who will fill the eyes of sons
who hold their breath, afraid to dream?
Their slumber shallow, their hopes held low…
no tender flesh on beds of green.
Who will hold the world in trust
when shattered clouds block out the light?
Though forged in grace, we turn to dust
we win the war, but lose the fight.
