The Crowd to Come

This chapter charts the course of exhortation through the contemporary work of multiple poets whose lives are bound up in global processes: Sean Bonney, Myung Mi Kim, and Agha Shahid Ali. Exhortation is one of the modes, stances, or registers of poetry that attempts to call forth a collective “we,” the “we” of lives that, in some case, lack a state at all, or, in other cases, refuse to link their identities to an oppressive regime. Yet instead of making an explicit gesture toward including an existing group, these poets use a hortatory aesthetics to shape the formal totality of the poem. However different in the stances they assume, Bonney, Kim, and Ali share a common endeavor to make the precarious “we” visible..