A version of this essay was presented at the Druskininkai Poetic Fall festival in Lithuania, October 2025, as part of a session devoted to ‘the soft power of poetry.’
For the past few months, I have been carrying with me a book of haikus, or near haikus, by the Japanese poet Sayumi Kamakura, translated into English by James Shea. Applause for a Cloud, published last year by Black Ocean press in Boston, begins with these lines:
I water a pansy,
giving some
to a stone as well
The poem opens a door in my mind. To step through it is to live, however briefly, with the odd generosity of giving water to a stone, which, unlike the pansy, has no existential need for such attention. Whether the water is spilled on the stone by accident or on purpose isn’t stated, yet the lines invite one to entertain a gift that is purposeless, as perhaps all the best gifts are.
Here is another of Kamakura’s poems:
The silence
of a two-year-old—
the shape of marshmallows
The lines steal into my mind and short-circuit all possible objections. I am instantly converted. Yes, yes—the shape of marshmallows—that is precisely it.
It could be said that a poem is an attempt to seduce one into abandoning the ordinary economies of power, the dreary scarcities and zero-sum arrangements of daily life, in favor of pleasure that is higher and freer, like the sky in this Kamakura poem:
To be cured
with the ease of clouds
breaking
Seduction, though, is gradual, and there is nothing gradual about the way these poems operate. Their pleasure arrives like a signal leaping a synapse. Seduction is also a conscious attempt to exercise a kind of power over another. Poetry wants as much to do with power as do Kamakura’s clouds, which drift above the very problem of power. Or perhaps it’s more precise to say that her poems dance the mind away from the problem, as in these lines:
Wrapping a waltz
around my ankle
I go into spring.
I want another word for the way these poems help me. They do not seduce, they do not persuade or convince, insist or argue. Nor do they affirm or empower.
Rather, they free my mind from struggle – from the usual machinations over money, food, status, land, and all those goods people are condemned to worry and fight over. They absolve me of the duty to play the illusionary games, opening a door in a wall that was never there at all; on the other side, is the grace of the real.
To abstain from political struggle is not to abandon it. It is to deny that struggle’s claims on the imagination and assert freer ways of being. To spend a day in the fragrance of Kamakura’s three-line poems is as worthy an act of political resistance as any protest. I say this as one who has helped stage acts of poetic protest in the streets of Washington – as one familiar with the charmed uselessness of such endeavors.
A case in point: last summer, the National Endowment for the Arts announced that, for ideological reasons, it would not disperse millions of dollars that had been promised to arts organizations. In response, one warm night in June, a group of us gathered in front of the NEA headquarters, on a street lined with federal office buildings. As security guards watched, we set up a projector on a sidewalk and proceeded to project fragments of poetry onto the cement walls of the building, including these lines by Robert Creeley:
America, you ode for reality!
Give back the people you took.
Let the sun shine again
on the four corners of the world.
And these words from Langston Hughes
O, let America be America again –
The land that never has been yet –
And yet must be – the land where every man is free.
Few people saw these lines light up the walls of an empty office building that June night. Our protest action changed no minds about NEA funding. It did not shift public opinion and resulted in no improvements in policy. Yet we all felt grateful to each other for collaborating on the endeavor. Some of the poems were our own or contributed by members of the Washington writing community, including these lines by T. Newyear:
Soviet dissidents knew:
Act like you live in a free land.
No one can take this from you
Unless you, afraid, cede it.
Art says this, too.
Art prepares dawn in the dark.
Art holds the embers
No false king can extinguish.
When the president of my country seeks to silence his critics, prosecute political enemies, and jail law-abiding immigrants – when the republic’s fragile pillars give way one by one, and tyrants abroad strive to bomb and bully their neighbors into submission – forgive me if my manner of resisting is as divorced from realpolitik as a haiku.
Poetry does prepare the dawn and hold the embers. It does so by freeing the mind from all things despotic and thus preserving our dignity when the harsh world would strip it from us. It operates this way not despite its softness, but because of it.
--Paul Jaskunas
Paul Jaskunas is the author of two works of fiction: The Atlas of Remedies (Stillhouse Press) and Hidden (Free Press), which received the Friends of American Writers Award. He has also published two short volumes of poetry: Mother Ship, a chapbook, and Drawing Lessons, a collection of ekphrastic poetry in conversation with the art of Warren Linn. His writing has appeared in numerous periodicals, including the THINK, Tab, America, Spiritus, and the New York Times. He edits Full Bleed, a journal of art and literature published annually by the Maryland Institute College of Art, where he has taught literature and writing since 2008.
Find out more about his writing here.