What is the relationship between poetry and social change?
Standing at the forefront of political poetry since the 1970s, Linton Kwesi Johnson has been fighting neo-fascism, police violence and promoting socialism while putting pen to paper to refute W.H. Auden’s claim that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.
Published on the 50th anniversary of those days in the spring of 68, “May Made Me” presents the legacy of the uprising: how those explosive experiences changed the individuals who participated and their lives as lived since then.
If we don’t do something real soon, I think you’ll have to agree that we’re going to be forced either to use the ballot or the bullet. It’s one or the other in 1964. It isn’t that time is running out—time has run out! —Malcolm X, 1964