Antioch MFA Program's Antioch Works For Democracy Initiative, Poetry is Democracy, was co-hosted by Program Chair Lisa Locascio Nighthawk, Core Poetry Faculty Cathy Linh Che, and Teaching Faculty Alistair McCartney. Six distinguished poets from the MFA student and alumni community—Jonathan Chou, Jessica Abughattas, Elena Karina Byrne, Shonda Buchanan, Grant Chemidlin, and Leonora Simonovis—read original poems responding to the theme, as well as selected poems by beloved poets. The readers also discussed their creative and research process for this event, the interface of the poetic and the political, the function of poetry in a just and inclusive democracy, and how poetry can question and expand democratic vistas.

With “Poetry is Democracy” Event, Antioch’s MFA Brings Art to an Election Year

Last fall, the Antioch MFA in Creative Writing led an initiative known as Poetry Is Democracy that commissioned new poems from six working poets and then brought them and the whole Antioch community together for a night of readings and reflection. The six alumni and student poets—Jonathan Chou, Jessica Abughattas, Elena Karina Byrne, Shonda Buchanan, Grant Chemidlin, and Leonora “Leo” Simonovis—each read their original pieces as well as pieces from other poets responding to democracy and poetry’s role within it at the culminating Poetry Is Democracy event. That event, held on Zoom on October 8, 2024, drew an audience of 76 community members from across Antioch University.

The initiative was part of Antioch Works for Democracy, a multi-month campaign of education and action to build a more just and inclusive democracy. “When the Antioch Works for Democracy initiative was shared with us, the phrase ‘Democracy is Poetry’ came to mind,” says Alistair McCartney, Teaching Faculty in the MFA program. He proposed it to the MFA team and ended up writing a proposal for funding from the Fund for Democratic Initiatives. As he explains, “I thought about the many brilliant poets who have graduated from our program, who embody our social justice mission in their work, who explore the interface between the poetic and the political, as well as the long, rich history of poetry, in the US and abroad, that explores and questions and addresses the possibilities of democracy.” 

As this idea of centering alumni voices came to shape as a project, McCartney flipped the two words around: Poetry Is Democracy. This order emphasized the acts of reading and writing poetry as a way to exercise and embody democracy. McCartney ended up inviting six MFA alums and students from a wide variety of backgrounds and styles to read original work. He also encouraged them  to explore and share the work of poets who came before them. While it was difficult to select only six poets—five alumni and one current student—to participate in the event, McCartney says, “I was clear that I wanted a plurality of positions and styles, and for a lineup that looked at the theme in distinct ways, from different subject positions, tackling it from a national and global perspective.” 

While each of the initiative’s participating poets is well-represented in the world of published poetry, some also have experience in fiction, nonfiction, literary editing, education, multidisciplinary art forms, and careers beyond creative writing. Chou, for example, is also a practicing psychiatrist, while Byrne is a multimedia artist. The intersection across these fields shone through in later discussions of the poetic process, as conversations surrounded poetics as a form of action and activism.

Despite the wide range of approaches each poet took to questions of democracy and its role within poetry, the poems came together into a chorus of thematic connections. “I was moved and impressed by the quality of the poems the readers created for the event,” says Lisa Locascio Nighthawk, the Chair of the MFA program. She says that she was “struck by the incredible connections between each of their contributions.” 

This interconnectedness was evident in Chemidilin’s poem, “The Homosexual Agenda,” which presented a narrator who was simultaneously fearful, weary, and hopeful, musing and calling to action for queer folks. Chemidilin explains, “Art is, and has always been, a form of resistance, but that resistance is inclusive, a space for people to process life around them and make sense of it all. We can change the world by changing how the world is seen. We just have to keep creating.”

This idea that creation can be a form of resistance continued in the reading that immediately followed Chemidlin’s, a poem by Danez Smith read by Abughattas: “anti poetica.” She followed this reading with her own written response. Abughattas’ original piece focused on the limitations of democracy and the place of poetry, echoing sentiments of exhaustion and fear—and perhaps some degree of hopefulness, too. 

The event also highlighted and celebrated the work of poets that inspired the evening’s readers. Buchanan chose to recite Langston Hughes’ “Let America Again” before reading her original piece, “What is Democracy?” She explains, “The role of poetry is deeply embedded in our ancient selves and modern-day consciousness as a portal to emotional truths. Often unspoken until the poem is written and read aloud, these truths can save our democracy as well as our human agency.” 

For Simonovis, as she approached this project she found an inherent complexity to applying a concept like democracy to our country’s current state. “In thinking about the idea of democracy, I kept getting lost into definitions that don’t seem to apply to our (world-wide) reality,” she says. “There was a part of me that wanted to bring hope and maybe even joy to the page, but every try seemed to take me farther away from that and deeper into the chaos we experience on a daily basis.”

The “Poetry Is Democracy” event provided a stirring example of the MFA program’s commitment to art-based social justice. As Locascio Nighthawk explains, Antioch is the only MFA program in the country with explicit emphasis and commitment towards social justice. “Poetry Is Democracy showcased the incredible strength of the MFA community as represented by its alumni and current students,” says Locascio Nighthawk. “It is very important to us, and wonderfully unifying, to live up to our values with events like this one.”