Guest columnist Steven Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, looks at poetry's long and distinguished history of censorship, from Ovid to Shel Silverstein.

2020, like every election year, is an especially good time to think about the First Amendment. There are few rights Americans hold more sacred than freedom of speech. Poets, like many artists, often serve as barometers of cultural and political change. That's why they are the first to be imprisoned or silenced in dictatorships or when governments take a turn toward totalitarianism. It's also why Plato deemed the poet "akin to the thief" not because we steal, but because ideas are dangerous and poetry is, as Mary Ruefle put it, "an act of the mind."

If prison is a way to control the body, then censorship is a means to control the mind or, at least, to control what a mind has access to. Sadly, every society employs some form of censorship, but as Steven Brown, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island, points out, if you flip the script, it can be a joy to resist.

Tina Cane, Poet Laureate of Rhode Island, tinacane.ink

The Joy of Censorship

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked

Allen Ginsberg, Howl

I am the Lorax who speaks for the trees, which you seem to be chopping as fast as you please!

Dr. Seuss, The Lorax

Although these two works would not, at first or even second or third glance, seem to have much in common, they both acutely demonstrate, in their own way, the awesome power of poetry to tackle contemporary mores and challenge the status quo. Their power and their success in that respect are evident, because they garnered one of arts greatest badges of honor: the government sought to censor them.

Ginsberg was famously brought to trial and acquitted on obscenity charges for the profanity-filled and sexually explicit content of "Howl." "The Lorax" was banned in at least one California school district for its allegedly negative portrayal of the logging industry, a major employer in the community.

Like prose, poetry has a long and distinguished history of censorship behind it. The Roman poet Ovid was purportedly exiled in 8 A.D. because of his risqu poetry, and the work of Sappho was ordered burned on more than one occasion.

In case anyone thinks weve made progress over the centuries, it is sobering to learn that Shel Silversteins famous childrens poetry collection, "A Light in the Attic," enraged enough hypersensitive folks that it ranked number 51 on the American Library Associations list of the most frequently challenged books in the 1990s. My favorite reason: one of the poems was accused of encourag[ing] children to break dishes so they wont have to dry them.

Of course, the poetry of music hasnt escaped the censors thumb of disapproval either. Whether its President Richard Nixons effort to encourage radio stations to censor songs with references to drugs or Tipper Gores 1980s crusade against explicit lyrics, there has never been a shortage of taste arbiters ready to keep dangerous musical stanzas at bay.

Rhode Island earns a dubious spot in that censorship hall of fame. In 1990, the ACLU had to sue the Westerly Town Council when it sought, for alleged public safety reasons, to revoke the license of a nightclub owner who invited the controversial rap group 2 Live Crew to perform. Among the towns stated safety concerns was the unprotected shore of the Atlantic Ocean on the beach adjacent to the club. In a victory for both free speech and common sense, the court was not persuaded.

While we may laugh at such amateurish attempts to squelch free speech, we must realize that it is an ever-present danger. At the same time, though, lets celebrate the meaning of such heavy-handed tactics: when the government seeks to censor a poem, it acknowledges its power to move people, to persuade them, to make them think.

Best of all, it does one other thing: it tempts people to taste the forbidden fruit. As Mark Twain gloated to his editor when a library in Concord, Massachusetts, banned "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" as trash, the censorship will sell us another 25,000 copies for sure!

Its winter. Enjoy it by snuggling up with a good book of poetry and, in doing so, quietly chalk up another victory against the bluenoses and censors in our midst.

Poetry contest

Enter your original poetry in a new statewide contest, sponsored by The Public's Radio, R.I. Poet Laureate and R.I. Youth Poetry Ambassador. Details are available at ribook.org.

Youth poetry group

Youth poets are invited to join an ongoing poetry group with the deputy youth ambassador, Tyler Cordeiro. It meets Saturdays at 2 p.m. at Brooklyn Coffee & Tea House, 209 Douglas Ave., in Providence.

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In a small state of poetry: Why poets are on the front lines of the free-speech fight - The Providence Journal