Steve Kowit’s poem “A Prayer” in the March 2011 issue strikes me as the achievement of a present-day Jonathan Swift.
In a culture where killing and death are staples of our entertainment as well as our news, Kowit’s poem affirms life in a way that is both poignant and intellectually acute. The poem is as skillful an example of the rhetorical strategy of miniaturization as I’ve ever seen. In making a case for saving the lives of “minuscule / midges & gnats” it walks a fine line between satire and pathos. Gnats and midges? we ask. Surely you must be joking! But the poem seems very much in earnest as it deepens to its true focus, the absolute and nonnegotiable premium on life. The argument for saving the gnats and midges turns on a powerful, satirical equivalence: that we seem to treat human life as casually as we do the lives of those almost invisible creatures afloat in a dog’s water bowl. Shame on us. If we cannot or will not cherish the lives of our own kind, “let us / save whom we can.” This is socially conscious writing at its finest.