I remember the hot, sultry evenings when corridos—songs of love and death on the Texas-Mexican borderlands—reverberated out of cheap amplifiers from the local cantinas and wafted in through my bedroom window.
Corridos first became widely used along the South Texas/Mexican border during the early conflict between Chicanos and Anglos. The corridos are usually about Mexican heroes who do valiant deeds against the Anglo oppressors. Pancho Villa’s song “La cucaracha,” is the most famous one. Corridos of John F. Kennedy and his death are still very popular in the Valley. Older Chicanos remember Lydia Mendoza, one of the great border corrido singers who was called la Gloria de Tejas. Her “El tango negro,” sung during the Great Depression, made her a singer of the people. The everpresent corridos narrated one hundred years of border history, bringing news of events as well as entertainment. These folk musicians and folk songs are our chief cultural mythmakers, and they made our hard lives seem bearable.10
A poet’s education.
After the divorce, I had new territory, much like the Oklahoma land run when a piece of land was claimed & had to be settled. I had spent years hiding behind my husband, the children & housework. Now the land & sky were open. That’s what’s frightening about the prairie at first its barrenness & lack of shelter. I had always written, but now my sense of place was defined by whatever mattered. I picked up my Indian heritage & began a journey toward ani-yun-wiyu, translated from the Cherokee, ‘real people.’
I read journals magazines. Poetry some fiction. I saw that feelings could be expressed in writing. Feelings of bewilderment & fear. Especially anger. It was a trend in women’s writing the pulley I needed out of the separation & isolation I felt without the surroundings of family. I saw women come to grips with themselves. The vulnerability, the struggle, the agonizing choices. I had to find a homestead within myself, or invent one. I dug a potato cellar.
Family had covered the fissures in my life. Now I had fragments shards whatever the territory offered. My poems & writing were the land I cultivated. I moved toward ‘being’ in poetry. A struggle for survival. My purpose was to find the truth of what I was my voice. What I had to offer. I could not have done it without the other voices the sun & rain & soil for myself as a person. The pleasure of being a woman.
I found that I weathered the prairie storms & the limitations that come with the territory. I found acceptance of myself the strength to travel prairie roads & talk about poetry in towns where farmers in the cafés stare. I relived the struggle to claim the land establish a sod house plow the fields milk the cow. The rest will come. All this is an internal land, of course. I started late with only a map given to me by other women who said the territory was there. It was a fertile landscape just inside the head. I had only to load the wagon, hitch the horses. A journey which my mother never made before she folded up her camp.
I learned to trust images. I could even experiment with words. Put muffler, glass packs on the wagon. Mud flaps if I wanted. I have what men have had liberty to be myself. Maybe women had it too & I just never knew. Wrong wright whatever. Now I could throw out the ice cubes find my severed limbs sew them on instead of giving heart & arms & lungs away. I have use for them on the edge of the frontier saw-edge after saw-edge.
The glory of the plain self in search of words to say, ‘the self’ / the delight of it. The birth the shedding of invisibility. The pursuit of she-pleasure. SHEDONISM.
The themes form experimental forms. Words as house & shed & outbuildings on the land. The urgency. The cessation of pounding myself hanging my separate parts to dry on low branches & rocks. It’s women who influenced my work. Their courage their trend toward revelation. I am on the journey to the ani-yun-wiyu.11
TOURISM AND PROMISED LANDS
Tourism. Can be a trap for poets, especially poets of North America who may elect to be escapist, breezy, about our empire, the sands we are lying on.
Poems decorated with brilliantly colored flowers, fronds, views from the cabana or through louvered shutters, dark silhouettes gutting fish, bearing mounds of fruit on their heads.
White poetry of the islands: no clue that there are poets, born and living there, who are building literary movements, who are part of an anticolonial resistance. The people of the fabulous realm: abstract figures on a simplified ground.
The exotic—that way of viewing a landscape, people, a culture as escape from our carefully constructed selves, our “real” lives—a trap for poets.
•
In my twenties, soon after World War II, I viewed Western Europe like that. The dollar was high, and college students from the United States could travel and study abroad with a sense of being on cultural holiday. Coming from our unscorched earth, our unblasted cities, we sought not the European present, traumatized and hectically rebuilding, but the European past of our schoolbooks. Being mostly white, we saw European culture as the ancestor of ours: we romanticized that ancestry, half in awe at its artifacts, half convinced of our own national superiority. In essence, Europe’s glorious past had been saved from barbarism by us and for us: a huge outdoor museum.
Many of the poems in my second book were poems of such tourism. It was a difficult, conflicted time in my own life, from which I gladly fled into poems about English or Italian landscape and architecture. Only once, in a poem called “The Tourist and the Town,” I tried to place myself as I was, alongside an acknowledgment that life in the foreign town was as “ordinary” as anywhere else.
Poems of tourism: like travel snapshots taken compulsively, a means of capturing, collecting, framing the ruins, the exotic street, the sacred rocks, the half-naked vending child, the woman setting forth under her colorful burden. A means of deflecting the meanings of the place, the meaning of the tourist’s presence, in a world economy in which tourism has become a major industry for poor countries and in which a different kind of travel—immigration in search of work—is the only option facing a majority of the inhabitants of those countries.
June Jordan turns this genre inside out in a poem called “Solidarity.” She balances the spoken word “terrorist” against the unspoken word “tourist.” But the tourists here are four women of color visiting Paris:
Even then
in the attenuated light
of the Church of le Sacre Coeur
(early evening and folk songs
on the mausoleum steps)
and armed
only with 2 instamatic cameras
(not a terrorist among us)
even there
in that Parisian downpour
four
Black women (2 of Asian 2
of African descent)
could not catch a taxi
and
I wondered what umbrella
would be big enough to stop
the shivering
of our collective impotence
up
against such negligent
assault
And I wondered
who would build that shelter
who will build and lift it
high and wide
above
such loneliness1
•
Poems of the artists’ colony: poems about grass being cut a long way off, poetry of vacation rather than vocation, poems written on retreat, like poems written at court, treating the court as the world.
This is not to deplore the existence of artists’ colonies, but rather the way they exist in a society where the general maldistribution of opportunity (basic needs) extends to the opportunity (basic need) to make art. Most of the people who end up at artists’ colonies, given this maldistribution, are relatively well educated, have had at least the privilege of thinking that they might create art. Imagine a society in which strong arts programs were integral elements of a free public education. Imagine a society in which, upon leaving school, any worker was eligible, as part of her or his worker’s benefits, to attend free arts worksho
ps, classes, retreats, both near the workplace and at weekend or summer camps. The values embodied in existing public policy are oppositional to any such vision. One result is that art produced in an exceptional, rarefied situation like an artists’ colony for the few can become rarefied, self-reflecting, complicit with the circumstances of its making, cut off from a larger, richer, and more disturbing life.
•
Who is to dictate what may be written about and how? Isn’t that what everybody fears—the prescriptive, the demand that we write out of certain materials, avoid others?
No one is to dictate. But if many, many poems written and published in this country are shallow, bland, fluent without intensity, timorous, and docile in their undertakings, must we assume that it’s only natural? Isn’t there something that points a finger in the direction of blandness, of fluency, something that rewards those qualities?
What is it that allows many poets in the United States, their critics and readers, to accept the view of poetry as a luxury (Audre Lorde’s term) rather than a food for all, food for the heart and senses, food of memory and hope? Why do poets ever fawn or clown or archly undercut their work when reading before audiences, as if embarrassed by their own claims to be heard, by poetry’s function as witness? Why do some adopt a self-conscious snake-oil shamanism, as if the electrical thread from human being through poem to other human beings weren’t enough? Why are literary journals full of poems that sound as if written by committee in a department of comparative literature, or by people still rehearsing Ezra Pound’s long-ago groan I cannot make it cohere—a groan that, after so many repetitions, becomes a whine? Why do so many poems full of liberal or radical hope and outrage fail to lift off the ground, for which “politics” is blamed rather than a failure of poetic nerve? Why have poets in the United States (I include myself) so often accepted that so little was being asked of us? asked so little of each other and ourselves?
The reviewer of a recent anthology of Los Angeles poets comments:
This book is not a response to public life, although it does share the despair and helplessness of the 1990’s, which the riots have helped crystallize. No: The burning here originates in the personal isolation into which these poets have plunged themselves, who appear to choose loneliness and self-pity as guides through their individual pain. . . . [S]uch wounds result not in any explosion, but in uneasy confessions. . . . Predictably, some poems do little more than photograph frustration and numbness. A poetry of stunned realizations, of therapy, it speaks of art as mere self-disclosure: We tell about our troubles, and we feel better.2
Isn’t there something that points a finger in the direction of mere self-disclosure, telling our troubles, as an end in itself? From television talk shows to the earnest confessions of political candidates, isn’t there a shunting off of any collective vitality and movement that might rise from all these disclosures? We feel better, then worse again, we go back to the therapeutic group, the people who understand us, we do not trouble the waters with a language that exceeds the prescribed common vocabulary, we try to “communicate,” to “dialogue,” to “share,” to “heal” in the holding patterns of capitalistic self-help—we pull further and further away from poetry.
The reviewer goes on to criticize the nervelessness of form that accompanies this attitude toward the materials: a “lackadaisical” craft. But even a highly crafted poem may evoke little more than a life of resigned interiority.
Interiority was the material for Emily Dickinson, yet she turned her lens both on her personal moment and on eternity. She had to make herself like that, embracing her own authority and linguistic strangeness, or she’d have joined the ranks of sad, fluent female singers of her North American century. She wanted more for poetry than that. More for herself.
•
In a time of great and mostly terrible uprootings, no “promised land” is a land for poetry. For Poetry the Immigrant, surrounded by her hastily crammed bags and baskets, there is no final haven. In its mixture of the ancient and the unthought-of, the well-loved and the unthinkable, its strange tension between conservation and radical excavation, poetry is continually torn between its roots, the bones of the ancestors, and its bent beyond the found, toward the future.
Raya Dunayevskaya wrote of revolution that while “great divides in epochs, in cognition, in personality, are crucial,” we need to understand the moment of discontinuity—the break in the pattern—itself as part of a continuity, for it to become a turning point in human history.3
Poetry wrenches around our ideas about our lives as it grows alongside other kinds of human endeavor. But it also recalls us to ourselves—to memory, association, forgotten or forbidden languages.
Poetry will not fly across the sea, against the storms, to any “new world,” any “promised land,” and then fold its wings and sing. Poetry is not a resting on the given, but a questing toward what might otherwise be. It will always pick a quarrel with the found place, the refuge, the sanctuary, the revolution that is losing momentum. Even though the poet, human being with many anxious fears, might want just to rest, acclimate, adjust, become naturalized, learn to write in a new landscape, a new language. Poetry will go on harassing the poet until, and unless, it is driven away.
SIX MEDITATIONS IN PLACE OF A LECTURE
I
Let me begin with a dream. I have been invited to give a lecture. Increasingly the expected format—the presentation of previously worked-out ideas—has become problematic for me. It rises up as a blockage to expression, a resistance to meaning. In the dream I am making the effort once more. What comes to me is the opening of Robert Duncan’s “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar,” the first line of which reads:
The light foot hears you and the brightness begins
Still dreaming, my mind becomes active, playing with the vowel sounds of the title and first line, hearing, in a state of peculiar happiness, recurrent I sounds, both short and long: “beginning with a line by Pindar,” the open vowels of the word “poem,” the long A of “Pindar,” the internal rhyming of “light” and “brightness,” the echo of “beginning” in “the brightness begins.” And the dream elides into another poem, from the middle range of the Nineteenth century in the New World: a strange, unloosen’d, wondrous time as the poet called it:
Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight,
Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child
leaving his bed wander’d alone. . . .1
Walt Whitman’s meditation on eros and death. A poem beginning with the cradle and the ninth month—not only September but the month of delivery, of birth—a poem that ends with the figure of “an old crone, rocking the cradle.” O’s and U’s and long I’s. N’s and M’s. Out . . . out . . . out . . . and over. Mockingbird syllables: Soothe! Soothe! Soothe! . . . Loud, loud, loud! . . . Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved! In the dream I do not intellectualize, I do not explicate, I listen to the liquidity of the language.
On waking I make a few notes: “Vowel sounds: first sounds we make at birth, perhaps the last we make at death.” “A poem begins in the ear not in the mind.” But these observations seem obvious and deadweight to me, not nearly as compelling as the language of the dream. The deadline for the lecture has weighed upon me; the dream and its poetry haunt me.
“Before I bring this poor, badly constructed lecture to a close. . . .” That’s Federico García Lorca, speaking in Spain in 1922 of the cante jondo, songs it was believed the Gypsies brought into Andalusia from ancient sources, music rapidly going to the grave with its aging singers, replaced in popular culture by flamenco and other forms, and derogated by the elite culture. He pleads for the preservation and dignifying of this “deep song,” and for support for the Festival of Cante Jondo he and the composer Manuel de Falla have organized. His motive is passionate, his words eloquent. Still, he apologizes—per
haps part nervously, part ironically—for the faulty formal construction of his lecture. Almost a decade later, in Buenos Aires, he would admit to his audience:
“From 1918, when I entered the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, until 1928, when I finished my studies in Philosophy and Letters and left, I attended, in that elegant salon . . . around one thousand lectures.
“Hungry for air and for sunlight, I used to grow so bored as to feel myself covered by a light film of ash about to turn into sneezing powder.
“And that is why I promise never to let the terrible bot-fly of boredom into this room, stringing your heads together on the fine thread of sleep and putting tiny pins and needles in your eyes.”2
To learn by going where I have to go, in Theodore Roethke’s words. The power and significance of an emerging consciousness, of form discovering its meaning, form indissoluble from meaning, is the process art (as creative change) depends on—and embodies. If this was perhaps not always so, in the past century it has been an unavoidable condition of making art.
“What are your poems about?” a stranger will sometimes ask. I don’t say, “About finding form,” since that would imply that form is my only concern. But without the intuition and mutation, in each poem yet again, of what its form will be, I have no poem, no subject, no meaning.
Even for poets like Pindar—in ages and cultures where the occasion for the poem is formal, ritualized, the poetry—if it is poetry—will tend to go its own way. Pindar wrote and declaimed his odes for the athletic games of Greece, which have come down to us as the modern “Olympics” for which nations and cities now contend, vying for enrichment of civic coffers, infrastructural development, nationalist prestige, global advertising. Poetry need not apply. Odd as it may or may not seem, the poet chosen to praise the victorious athletes of the various Greek games was a sought-after figure, honored as the athletes themselves. The odes were prescribed in form, but Pindar was outrageous, Pindar invented out beyond the forms, Pindar was accused by later critics as too far-out, over-the-top—but also praised for the richness and complexity of his work.
Essential Essays Page 30