Poetry in the poly-crisis

I like to imagine my little red devil, the glib demonic version of me on my left shoulder, as an iPhone. He’s unequipped with human wit, yet constantly quips about a mean-spirited world, himself tremendously lacking in both spirituality and meaning. He feeds me apocalyptic titbits, zero-effort, extra-waste dopamine hits, flooding me with a non-stop onslaught of slop: ‘Look at me, look at me, look at me!’ He urges me towards apathy; he wants me to feel hopeless.

The angel on my right shoulder is, of course, a book. On most days, a collection of poetry, recently – by contemporary Latvian authors. Poetry as a craft, due to its roots in the lived body, its experiential-processual (rather than instant-result-orientated) nature, its dependence on intuition, its habit of forming connections beyond logic, is not, nor will ever be, in my view, in any danger of being erased by AI. It remains the concern of individuals. ‘Look at yourself!’ the book says, flapping her papery wings. She rarely solidifies the status quo; she does not want me to be hopeless.

As information technology gives me very practical advice throughout my day-to-day and helps me navigate urban and digital terrain, it also frightens and controls me. Books of poetry, on the other shoulder, give me little to no knowledge about the material universe, yet they create a space for solace and self-redemption. This leads me to suggest that lyric poetry, even if we exclude directly topical cases, still has much to say about – or offer to – the current state of the world, the so-called ‘poly-crisis’.

Poetry makes you open, not resilient – and that’s a good thing

A planetary community that is torn by genocides, military conflicts, climate breakdown and a tsunami of corporatism, is still made up of people. Although the perceived promise of poetry (an all-unifying truth-song) has always been undeliverable by what poetry mostly does (toys with polysemy), we shouldn’t underestimate the untraceable effects that an impression made on the smallest scale can have on larger-scale issues. Stanzas will not shield me from bombs, but they can accompany us working through grief, potentially saving a life in ways we may not be able to pinpoint. This is why intimacy and subjectivity (both of which abound in poetry) are important – their message is: change starts with me.

I was once talking to Julia Fiedorczuk, sometimes (narrowly) labelled an eco-poet, who said that poetry may have no business bringing about tangible social change, it has more to do with personal liberation and imagination – it is simply one way to live gracefully within the catastrophe. I agree, but I also feel that writing has always been deeply invested in the well-being of others (and I don’t think my Polish colleague would disagree). Otherwise, I speculate, we would not publish verse.

I am, of course, writing from a position of privilege, from relative safety, from a NATO member state. We do sense the threat of Russia’s aggression, daily, though I am, for now, closer to an anxious bystander than anything else. And it is precisely because of my situation that I am terrified of becoming indifferent. I want to at least try to exist ethically, and I believe poems can help. Not by engineering solutions to complex problems or tackling hyper-objects, but by making me sit with the ‘uncomfortable’, fostering empathy, by being attentive to hypo-subjects. We know that reading something someone thoughtfully crafted is a stretching exercise for the intellect, it tests the elasticity of my emotions and makes my understanding flexible. That, if anything, is an antidote to primitive categorical thinking and obsessive negativity – traits favoured by populists but becoming widespread in general.

For example, one of the most well-known theatre directors in Latvia, Alvis Hermanis, has recently gone into politics. After repeatedly expressing agreement with the US president Donald Trump (who has threatened to end a ‘whole civilization’, was close friends with child sex offenders, and is a convicted felon), Hermanis has also called ‘The Progressives’ (the Latvian political party that has ‘preventing discrimination’ as part of their programme) a force of ‘absolute evil’.

As much as I’d like to further lambast Hermanis’s bombastic drivel, the real threat is another artist succumbing to an ‘everyone is bad & against me’ mentality and polluting the airwaves with micro-fascisms, the elementary particles of war. To be fair, we do have poetry – often on the other side of the ideological spectrum – that goes down that route, i.e., poetry that seems to assume that repeated emphasis on contemporary horror somehow disarms, rather than disseminates it. And I can’t truly blame those who become enamoured with pessimism – here, in the former occupied territories, the amount of disheartening sentiment can become overwhelming even outside of algorithmically curated social media.

And yet, for the most part, poetry is affirmative. It restores justice, it soothes. It runs counter to the discourse of despair. I’ve seen people, friends of mine, say that despair is a natural reaction to reality. It could follow that poetry-as-opposition-to-despair is therefore denying reality. But that is obviously false. Despair comes from assuming powerlessness, but poetry, even if it is not a direct call-to-action, empowers. Every lyrical ‘I’, the voice that speaks a poem, is an inhabitable perspective, and as such, it is the unasked-for freedom and responsibility the reader is made to bear.

A poem bestows self-worth and necessitates self-reflection, which is difficult in a state of emergency (in some cases a luxury), but it wasn’t meant to be easy. It is everything, but escapism. But in contrast to the unnerving narratives about how divided we are and the fragmented mental derangement we get from doom-scrolling, a poem can, relevantly, demonstrate the interconnectedness of life – or, ultimately, testify to the painful loss of it.

This is not about some vague universal art that transcends politics (no such thing). Literature emerges within earthly colonial contexts and at its best recognises its part in resisting despotism. But practicing moral clarity and acknowledging interdependency are not mutually exclusive. And so, consequently, when I was pondering what the poetry of my country says about today, I saw authors thinking about how their lives are entwined with the lives of others – now and in the past. After revisiting different voices that speak about time, legacy and the body, I arrived, somewhat surprisingly, at a reflection on alcohol consumption.

The spirits (& wine) of Latvian poetry

Some works directly represent past events – books by Gunta Šnipke (Ceļi (Paths), 2018), Andra Manfelde (Poēma ar mammu (Poem with Mum), 2022) and Daina Sirmā (Dievaines, 2017) have both recalled and recreated histories. Due to its tendency to present itself in momentary flashes, linked merely by association, poetry more closely resembles the work of memory than prose. Therefore, it becomes possible, whilst reading Sirmā, to ‘remember’ an afternoon from the 19th century.

For others, however, the relationship with time is uncanny. Modernism was and remains an impossible-to-bypass rupture in the cultural continuum(s) of Europe. And the poems of such Latvian authors as Raimonds Ķirķis or Arvis Viguls roam our pages like spectres of high modernism, complex, stylised, formally masterful. They are met with meta-modern sincerity, the ‘authentic’ (post-ironic) directness of Marija Luīze Meļķe, Madara Gruntmane, Linda Mence, Lāsma Olte and others. ‘– are you ready to see God? / one two three / my son grabs the rope of the blinds and pulls / – attention, he is invisible!’[1] writes Olte (– jums gaisma netraucē? (– is the light not bothering you?), 2026) amalgamating parental and filial viewpoints. No highfalutin similes, just showing what you mean and doing it as clearly as spring water. The former group is always in dialogue with the past and is interested in how it punctures the present, the latter always in dialogue with the present and is interested in how it punctures the future.

But there is one theme that has recently become more topical than any other – corporality. Katrīna Rudzīte with her book Dažas piezīmes par ķermeni (A Few Notes on the Body, 2025), is a prime example, and her straight-forward style is symptomatic of the local wave of confessional writing. Liepa Rūce and Ausma Perons have powerful poems on giving birth – depicting motherhood ‘as is’, without attempting to fit into heteropatriarchal norms. ‘I'm taking to the oars / listening to the pain that’s coming / I’m pushing as hard as I can / I can’t miss the contractions / there’s a hot doughnut on my body’ (Perons, Tā beidzot Tu (Is it finally You), 2025). Similarly, the collectively penned Atbildes (Answers, 2025) gathers the biographical poems of several women that were asked to write a response to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem ‘Autobiography’ (a gesture inspired by Swedish poet Sonja Åkesson).

When authors talk about being in / of bodies, they are inevitably talking about being within power structures. In her 2026 book Piena mugurkauls (Milk spine), Elīna Vendija Rībena draws a parallel between the changing of the seasons and menstruation. The floods and the blood meld in a broader vision of perpetual – political – renewal. Moreover, while the body is, to a degree, regulated by biology, it is also inscribed socially, and the proliferation of visceral stories in Latvian poetry is not over-sharing, it arises from an awareness of being marked by the perceptions of others; it is witnessing that one’s flesh can end up entrenched in violent networks that are held up by silence. Writing about the body means writing about trauma, writing about trauma means writing about trans-generational prejudice – this is how poetry embodies the close-knit relatedness of things.

But it mustn’t necessarily be about the knees and toes of the poet, on occasion authors opt for a more depersonalised exploration of such themes as alcoholism, our toxic national heritage. To me, there is something in the way we represent our high-proof moment that makes Latvian poetry stand out against Anglophone literatures. We love to drink, and we hate ourselves for it. This means, when we depict drinking, it is never unproblematic, so we usually add irony to the mix. Sometimes, just a tiny splash:

‘Paradise is in two teenagers when they skip maths class, / as well as geography, English, and form class to go to the seaside, / drink Lucky Dog cider, and try to fuck in the forest / even though it’s winter and it’s wet’[2] (Henriks Eliass Zēgners, Paradīze (Paradise), 2021).

Sometimes, we choose to admit our flaws disarmingly and stir in about a third of bitter self-awareness:

‘I’ll drink – because I don’t know any other way to let loose what I consider to be myself, the delicate dress, the bra straps, the immense desire to please, so that my dad can tell me again – good girl, swim to me, that’s it, very good’ (Anna Auziņa, Annas pūra govs (Anna’s dowry cow), 2017).

Other times, there is a 1:1 ratio between joking and melancholy:

‘there goes that little summer / dear boy / there she goes / remember / I told you a long time ago / I guess I misspoke / or rather you misheard / here it is / the sex on the beach / the little pastries on the shore / sand in our hair for the next two nights / here it is’ (Kirils Ēcis, te nu ir tā vasariņa (here’s that little summer), 2025).

And then, sometimes, the irony is just 85% strong:

‘I didn’t drink anything all day yesterday,          that means ALL DAY         from morning until late evening,          that includes the very late evening [...]          on my honour, carefully considering yesterday’s events,          I still can’t remember a single moment    during which I would have emptied a bottle of white or red wine,          a timid shot of grappa or tequila’ (Ilmārs Šlāpins, Cilvēks bez noteikta dzīvesveida (A person without a certain lifestyle), 2025).

The importance of alcohol in literary development has been widely documented, though the Eastern European situation is lesser known. As in most places, we’ve both recognised liquor as a social problem, as well as hyped it up. But when reading Latvians, it is crucial to realise how it was perceived during the late Soviet era: a protest, a marker of unconformity. Drinking signified the unwillingness to participate in the overall charade of Soviet comradery.

This led to the romanticisation of drinking and a set of stereotypes that we still can’t seem to shake. The exciting version would have us believe that in vino veritas, but the truth is that alcoholism steers us, at best, towards being ill-odoured and loud-mouthed, and, at worst, towards sickness, isolation and death. Few things give me more hope than hearing someone say that the younger generations drink less – or not at all. I say that because of the correlation between substance abuse and domestic violence. Statistically, Latvia has a serious problem with both.

In fact, one of the best poems from 2025 was a conceptual piece on this topic by Lauris Veips – a poem done in the cross-out technique that confronts the gobsmacking fact that the majority of the Latvian Parliament actually voted to denounce the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and household terror – also known as the Istanbul Convention. The poem consists of the text of the original document having been inked out to leave only the ‘law’ that would come in its place, should the convention be truly denounced. Instead of reading normally, each line is drowned in black, allowing just for infrequent gasps of contorted ethics: ‘violence /// is one of the crucial social mechanisms’ etc.

As drinking becomes contextualised from the perspective of the 21st century, it is demystified, deneutralised and unmasked as the nexus of aggressive masculinity and insecurity. Artis Ostups writes about having met ‘some stinky poets, sweaty and hung-over, covered in old winds, in wet wool coats,’ and recognises that they are ‘victims of capitalism and depression rather than sweet ideas’ (published in Domuzīme, no. 2, 2026). Here, again, systems of inequality are made apparent, perhaps softly obstructed, by the compassion of poetry.

Epilogue

As an easily awestruck teenager spellbound by the angels of poesy, I subscribed to the platitude that writing is what the world is worth saving for. Now, in adulthood, the task of literature, for me, has become to show that saving – or just caring for – the world is, in fact, still possible. The explosive intensity at which I bombard myself with discouraging ‘content’ à la the demon on my left shoulder erodes my will, while, dangerously, conjuring the illusion of involvement. But getting enraged by is not the same as engaging with.

This essay is driven by a wish to treat the subtle and private as forms of serious engagement with the brutalities of modern life. Poets see the normalisation of narrow-mindedness and go on to write for the visibility of their bodies. They see the oppression of marginalised groups – and write about addiction in the family. They see us failing to learn from history and decide to revitalise avantgarde aesthetics. Far from advocating a refusal to participate, I am celebrating the opposite. Not all poems explicitly address the shitshow, so their urgency may not be obvious. But they are nevertheless deep, healthy and critical ways of responding to a monstrous, dizzying reality. The devil, insofar as that word means the inhuman manner of seeing, is always anti-poetic, that is, against making, it is non-constructive, that is, destructive.

A poem, by definition, can only ever oppose destruction.

[1] All translations, unless noted otherwise, are mine.

[2] Translated by Ieva Lešinska.