For when people are dehumanized, hated and expelled, fall prey to the irrationality of populism and nationalism, which exults in power and position to the detriment of individualism, respect, and democracy, we must fight back.
As writers, as queer writers, as Black or Brown, as white, or middle class, or working class or working poor, as disabled writers, or neurodiverse writers, academics, asylum seekers, or refugees, we must resist. We all must participate with laser focus on the danger at hand. Our writing must take aim with fiery precision, with clear conscience, with rhetoric which many may see as overtly political, lacking in literary polish or politeness, balance, or thorough research. We need to write our renunciations, our anger, and our firm rejections everywhere on all the surfaces of this society. We must cover every executive order, or supercilious budget, or congressional bill with Keith Haring’s graffiti and Basquiat’s erasures or Audre Lorde’s or Adrienne Rich’s lyrical condemnations of imperial violence. We must write over any hatred, intolerance, bigotry or ignorant display, over and over with the declaration of our freedom. We must confront and not retreat. We must crowd out, shout out, write over, the lies, the redactions and revisionary texts that some will put forward on pages and edicts deemed official.
It is contingent on us to resist the hour, as writers and thinkers, as artists who identify as gay or lesbian or trans or bi or queer, as Black, as Brown, as all stripes of cultural heritage, or association, to put our hearts in action and flood the culture with our protest and our truth, just as those now in power have sought to flood and overwhelm our justice system and our constitutional traditions and way of life.
Walter Holland isthe author of four books of poetry, including: Reconstruction (Finishing Line Press, 2022), Circuit (Chelsea Station Editions, 2010), Transatlantic (Painted Leaf Press, 2001), A Journal of the Plague Years: Poems 1979-1992 (Magic City Press, 1992) as well as a novel, The March (Hard Candy Editions at Masquerade Books, 1996; Chelsea Station Editions, second revised edition, 2011). Recent poetry credits include “Second Coming” at Indolent Books online, “Impossible Archetype” Issue #17, “The Rappahannock Review,” as well as the March 2025 anthology “In the Footsteps of a Shadow” from MadHat Press. He reviews frequently for “Rain Taxi.” For more information visit his website.
