PHOTO/RPBchi
CHICAGO, IL — If you flip through the pages of a People’s Tribune newspaper, you will find the people’s poems—true gems of revolutionary imagination and artistic reporting from the front lines of the class war. You will also find stories from the cultural renaissance that is sweeping the country as a creative expression of the profound changes society is going through.
As the Mission Statement of the San Francisco Revolutionary Poets Brigade says, “poetry has always been and continues to be not only the way the poet listens to his or her innermost being, but a way the spirit of the times, in its most forward-looking incarnation, is expressed and heard.”
Following in the footsteps of the San Francisco Revolutionary Poets Brigade and other cities around the globe, a few justice-focused poets started a Chicago Revolutionary Poets Brigade in 2014 (#RPBchi). We facilitate our own political education and collective organizing of cultural events and programs to connect artists to the existing movements around State violence, education, water, war, the environment, and other life-or-death issues.
One of our primary focuses is on the education fight that is once again heating up in Chicago. Seeing the possibility of another teacher’s strike, we decided to form a project called “ODE: Operation Defend Education.” ODE is an effort to uplift youth voices in the struggle for decent education in Chicago through poetry, writing, and the arts. We are helping to organize spoken word, hip hop, and other forms of artistic expression at rallies, actions, and other events in defense of public education, with a focus on youth. We are facilitating free writing workshops on education in schools and community groups, and putting together a blog for youth expression in the form of writing, audio, video, or artwork. Check out the blog at projectode.org.
A recent event we put on was around the Flint Water Crisis. It was called “The Last Fish: Water Is A Human Right.” (The title refers to a recent study that estimated that the oceans might be dead by the year 2048.) The program, hosted by RPBchi members Lew Rosenbaum and Eric Allen Yankee, brought together a diverse group of artists and activists to speak on the Flint Water Crisis from different angles. Chicago distributors of the People’s Tribune produced a poetry insert for Flint for the April (national poetry month) edition. At the event, Lew read his poem, “It’s Not The Same River” from the insert, which says “No one can make the babies come back/But we can have clean, free water for all/By ending the rule of private property/that protects golf courses and/Preys upon the lives of our people./We are all related.”
Revolutionary poets, now is our time to organize and sharpen our weapon. As Jack Hirschman, co-founder of the original Revolutionary Poets Brigade, has said, “poetry can be the greatest weapon in revolutionary struggle.” And in the words of the great revolutionary poet Roque Dalton: “Poetry, like bread, is for everyone.”
To get involved in the #RPBchi and/or submit to the ODE blog, email revolutionarypoetsbrigadechi@gmail.com
