This Oakland-Based Poet Wants You to Step Up Your Politics

Simpson’s poetry performances are full of emotion and energy. (Darius Simpson)

Darius Simpson is the kind of guy who has to wait until Saturday night to take calls. The poet, educator, farmer, and activist stays fully engaged in a plethora of Bay Area communities. And in a time when the word “activist” has become closer to a personality trait or a Hinge line item than anything to do with politics, it’s important to Simpson to make sure people know what they mean when they call themselves that. Rather than participating in movements, he says many tend to content themselves with observing. “What I notice about the landscape in arts, but also broadly in the so-called United States,” Simpson says, “is a damaged capacity to live out our politics. We don’t feel a conviction or responsibility for each other anymore.”

Thoughts of his like these sometimes come out as poems, sometimes as posts that go viral on the website formerly known as Twitter and Instagram. It’s just a vehicle for the Akron, Ohio born-and-raised writer, though. For him, he knew he couldn’t walk away from politics in his life once Mike Brown was murdered by police in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. How the public reacted, and how the state worked to dismantle that reaction, stuck with him. “That was the point of no return for me,” Simpson says. It means he sees non-legitimate politics more critically than some.

(Darius Simpson)

Take the Moms 4 Housing movement in Oakland. Simpson sees that event as a legitimate call for better support to tenants and renters. But the movement was co-opted as local politicians — themselves often working against movement building with short-sighted legislation — rallied around the grassroots movement. On the national level, Simpson points out the White House has pulled similar maneuvers with student loan forgiveness.

All the phoniness and slacktivism is why Simpson stays tapped in with the People’s Programs. There are classes, breakfast programs, and community farming. Founded in 2017, the pan-African independent group was brought together to focus young people on self-reliance and community resilience. On the writing side of things, he just launched When The Smoke Comes, a writing series he co-leads. The idea is to create radical worlds, recognizing the state as one’s enemy through art.

There are sparks of real pushback in the Bay, too. Protestors disrupted a private dinner for Chevron executives at Rockridge restaurant Acre to protest the company’s supplying of oil to Israel. Poets including Simpson hold demonstrations sharing their testimony, such as Jess Semaan whose family lives in Syria, Lebanon, and Ghaza. As long as activism and politics stay on chatrooms and between cubicles, though, theory will never materialize into actions like these recent activations. “We stay in step one so long it becomes step zero,” Simpson says. “Now we have to convince people that something should be done whereas, in the past, it was ‘Oh my god, we need to do something.'”