"The Leash" is a political poem in many ways: in it, the speaker strives to make sense of gun violence, climate crisis, and a country deeply divided by hatred. But what do we mean when we call poems "political"? Do we lose any nuance or complexity by labeling a piece of art as political? Does labeling it "political" push away potential readers who might not share Ada Limón's life experience and values? The word hardly tells us everything we need to know about a poem, or any artwork, and can obscure as much as it illuminates.
One of the difficult decisions an artist makes when approaching political subjects is specificity. If they name a specific event—for instance, if this poem were titled "A response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting"—it gives the poem immediate relevance, and there can be no doubt of its subject. A poem like that might be read and shared widely in the aftermath of a specific tragedy, but it may feel too time-bound and too specific to many readers even a year or two later. "The Leash," in contrast, is generic in its descriptions of violence: it does not name a unique event, but instead aims to address an overall sense of despair and tragedy that stems from the buildup of so many horrors.
Limón addresses the big questions of life: pain, love, growth, honesty, and more. She connects these universal topics to personal scenes from her own life, as she does with the dog walk in this poem, and the benefit of this is that it gives the reader a vulnerable, human poetic speaker to relate to, as opposed to the omniscient detached speaker we see first in lines 1-4. However, the poem remains unbound to any particular era, election season, or news cycle. By combining broad themes with her own everyday life, Limón makes the poem simultaneously intimate and universal, vivid but timeless.
Of course, Limón's own identities and experiences still carry weight, some of which are inevitably political. Her work carries deep feminist perspectives born from her gendered experience as a woman, visible in her popular poem "How to Triumph Like a Girl," or the opening poem of The Carrying, "A Name," in which the speaker imagines Eve (rather than Adam) naming the world's animals. "The Contract Says: We'd Like the Conversation to Be Bilingual" speaks honestly about Limón feeling pigeonholed for her Mexican-American heritage and "A New National Anthem" grapples with nationalism and the little-known third verse in "The Star-Spangled Banner" that discusses slavery. Limón's poem "Killing Methods" was anthologized in Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now (2017), a volume responding to deepening injustice and political divides. Though published shortly after the inauguration of President Trump, the RRL anthology wisely did not confine itself to being an inauguration response alone. Limón, with many of her contemporaries, understands that the wounds of violence and injustice that her poetry seeks to heal are bigger than any one political leader.
Another way "The Leash" avoids a potential pitfall as a political poem is that it does not prescribe a set worldview. The only direct command it has for the audience is not to die; it does not campaign or lobby for the audience to change any beliefs on the spot. The speaker admits her own uncertainties in line 14, preventing the poem from promising solutions that it cannot realistically deliver. It is a delicate balance: poems become relevant by addressing real issues in the world, but a poem will never be a panacea for all those ills. In a 2018 interview with Steph Opitz from LitHub, Ada Limón was asked if she agrees that "writers are becoming more political," and responded:
I don’t know if we are getting more political or if people are just paying closer attention. I do think that it’s a time where everything feels connected. It’s impossible to talk about injustice at the workplace without also talking about systemic white supremacy and heteronormativity and ableism. The concept of intersectionality isn’t new for writers and poets, it’s where we live. We live in the liminal spaces where things are connected and where the threads of the universe show up in our hands like lifelines. So, I don’t know if we are getting more political or if people are needing poems more so that we are seeing them more places. Poetry is the right place for handling intense political and personal topics because it never has to provide an answer. It has no tidy ending and it’s not a polemic. It’s a place for mess and truth and life and honesty and complication and what’s more political than acknowledging that something doesn’t have an easy answer, and that our contemporary problems are also our historic problems?
"The Leash" is not a polemic, that is, a written attack; it triumphs more in how it balances rage and despair with joy and hope. There is a place in political poetry for rage, but rage can be a shallow emotion on its own. In a PBS interview, Ada Limón discussed why her poems contain more than just rage:
I believe people are reading more poetry because we distrust the diatribe, the easy answer, the argument that holds only one note. Poetry makes its music from specificity and empathy. It speaks to the whole complex notion of what it means to be human.
And that is exactly what we need more of these days: a chance to be seen fully in both our rage and our humanity.
Limón believes that poetry itself holds some of the answers to the "crepitating crater of hatred" described in "The Leash." It is political, universal, and complex all at once. It is an antidote to political polarization, that centrifugal force which pushes people to be one-dimensional, only one thing or only its opposite. Limón's poetry carves out a space for readers to be whole and complex beings, to help sustain our humanity.
