They Will Simply Continue to Sing

Emma Mullay

Instructor’s Introduction

In WR 153: All Poetry Is Political students read the work of contemporary poets who draw attention to social and political issues, often by exploring the interplay between personal experience and political realities. Students also write their own collection of poetry centered around something they see as a genuine problem or concern.

Emma Mullay’s poetry collection They Will Simply Continue to Sing is grounded in an ethos of inquiry. What happens when we let our fellow citizens down or are let down by systems that are bigger than us? When books are taken away from children, what are the implications for learning and citizenship? Emma explores other forms of censorship in her poems: the Trump administration’s defunding of non-profit and government institutions, as well as discouraging the use of particular words, including “Biological, clean energy, biodiversity. / Pollution, climate crisis, climate science.” A logical outcome is “voting for paranoia because you don’t / understand complexity or reason.” Emma is not afraid to speak directly or even angrily. But the poems also display a spirit of play that is essential to human growth and understanding: the redaction of a White House document reveals a different story, that “the Federal Government infringed on speech of American citizens in a manner that advanced the Government’s preferred narrative.” Ultimately, the poems within They Will Simply Continue to Sing contend, “You cannot silence the people, / ruin their speech, rip the protest / from their throat.” Like the lighthouse of the cover image, like Emma’s high school librarian Mrs. Hickson, we can be “beacon[s] of light” for one another when it feels as if “the bad outweighs the good.”

Jessica Bozek

From the Writer

This piece was born out of a frustration with the blatant and shameless censorship that has started to take root, particularly in the United States. Throughout the new presidential administration, there has been a significant uptick in both the amount of information being withheld from the public as well as the verbiage that government officials are allowed to use. 

While I believe every form of censorship is in some way political, I also wanted to talk about literary censorship, particularly with my own experiences with the attempts to ban books at my high school. The controversy and debate surrounding a few books, mostly about queer or minority experiences, was present for most of my time in high school. The last poem here is an homage to the librarian who fought to keep those books on the shelves. 

I started this piece with a somewhat bleak outlook on the world, focusing mainly on all of the bad that I saw within it, but by the end I really wanted to focus on all of the success that people have had standing up and fighting back against this censorship. I feel like it is easy to get caught up in everything bad that is happening around you and can get difficult to focus on the good, and I wanted to make sure that both were included within these poems. 

They Will Simply Continue to Sing (PDF)

Emma Mullay is a sophomore studying Journalism in the College of Communications. She is from New Jersey, and grew up genuinely loving to learn about the world around her. Because of this, she has always had an interest in information that has restrictions on it, particularly on censorship both in and out of the United States. She would love to extend her thanks to her high school English teachers — Barbara Carr, Lauren Fedorko, and Zachary Shoemaker — as well as to Professor Jessica Bozek and the BU Writing Program for creating an environment that allows students to create work that they are genuinely passionate about.