A poem beginning with a line by Pindar, written by a twentieth-century poet (Robert Duncan) who was, himself, to be accused by some critics of being too far-out, too over-the-top:
The light foot hears you and the brightness begins
Feet that hear? Who or what is that “you”? It’s the lyre of Apollo, music, measure: the source of poetry.
The light foot hears you and the brightness begins
god-step at the margins of thought,
quick adulterous tread at the heart.
Who is it that goes there?
Where I see your quick face
notes of an old music pace the air,
torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre.
Poetry, for Duncan, is an erotic pull “at the margins of thought,” adulterous in its wandering from the intellectual straight and narrow. Even the shape of the Greek lyre becomes a torso, as if the “you” of poetry dissolves into the “you” of a male lover. And, as Duncan tells us in a later essay, “In Pindar it is the harp of Apollo that the light foot of the dancer hears, but something had intruded, a higher reality for me [italics mine], and it was the harp that heard the dancer. ‘Who is it that goes there?’ the song cried out.”3
Who is it that goes there? “at the margins of thought”? And now I begin to see the path for which the dream has acted as trailhead.
II
On my worktable are two books, each with a title containing the word poetics. One is Smadar Lavie’s The Poetics of Military Occupation, a woman anthropologist’s study of the Mzeini Bedouin dwelling on the south Sinai peninsula in the 1970s and 1980s.4 The other is the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant’s visionary work, The Poetics of Relation. Each author has reached for an unconventional form: Glissant’s a layered, spiraling meditation on Antillean language, Creole patois, and especially poetry as a world-embracing reality—an aesthetics of recognition of the Other. Writing in French, an imposed colonial language, Glissant invents his own vocabulary for human dispersions, voluntary and enforced: “I build my language with rocks,” he says.
Lavie, a Sephardic/Ashkenazic Israeli, doing years of fieldwork in a Bedouin and Muslim tribal ethos long penetrated by foreign military powers, most recently Israeli, and by the incursions of foreign tourism, seeks to traverse gender and ethnic lines in a strongly gendered and self-conscious culture, writing both as “the anthropologist” who observes, makes notes, tape-records and photographs, produces rational text, and as the “I” who reacts, feels, brings her own life to her experiences: the woman participant-observer who faints at a ritual female circumcision.
But what is this word poetics? In its narrowest sense it is taken as a descriptive, normative criticism of what poetry is. But really, there can be no definition of poetry except in actual poems—which are as disparate and various (and interlinked) as people and cultures are. Poetics, we could say, refer to and describe the heterogeneous expressive, linguistic means by which we human beings survive and interpret our collective and individual lives—but even this falls short.
Lavie witnesses to how the Mzeini Bedouin, under first Egyptian and then Israeli military occupation—invaded also by hippie culture imported from America via Europe and Israel, by filmmakers intent on their exotic representations, by Egyptian drug-smuggling operations—struggle to make sense of their historical being, their contemporary identity, through poetry, proverbs, song, oral allegorical stories, and spontaneous performances. Her account illuminates the resources of language for people without material power, negotiating their ways with the foreigner as they must, but for whom the central question, after physical survival, is: Who are we? Where herding and date harvesting have given way to day labor on the occupier’s roads, smuggling hashish, picking up the garbage left by seasonal tourists on the beaches, what does it mean to be Bedouin? Where hospitality to the stranger has been a core point of honor and pride, what does it mean to open your house to the exploiter and the occupier? Where the keeping private of women has required veiling, how regard the unveiled anthropologist, the naked Western backpackers screwing each other on the beach? Lavie discovers the imagination and wit—and sometimes the formal silences—that continually re-create self-meaning among people whose traditions include the arguing of cases at trial in “improvised rhymed poetry . . . dense, and therefore short and pungent.”
For both Glissant and Lavie, poetics does not imply simply literary criticism or a treatise on poetry. For Glissant it becomes a means of referring to a kind of expressive consciousness, embedded in language, a movement toward coexistence and connection. He does not minimize the risks and difficulties of such a consciousness. One way or another, the emotional apartheid of domination is a legacy of global history. For Caribbean peoples it has been that of the Plantation; for most people at most times some version of the apartheid of power: between the imposers of hierarchy, the violent censors of other languages and lives, the appropriators of culture, and those who have—not without resisting—been silenced and penalized for their languages, their art, their selves. Pervasive throughout, as Amartya Sen has shown, lies that rift of inequality between the freedoms implied by wealth and the absence of freedom intrinsic to poverty.5 Glissant opens a huge window onto the possibility of another model: the “human imaginary” he calls Relation.
Relation for Glissant is not a panacea or a utopia or any pseudo solidarity.6 It is not comfortable and sweet; as Gerard Manley Hopkins said of Peace, “It does not come to coo.” Relation is turbulence, exposure, an identity not of roots but of meeting places; not a lingua franca but a multiplicity of languages, articulations, messages. It can appear to us, accustomed as we are to thinking in terms of separate and unequal nations, ethnicities, religions, tribes (and, I would add, genders), as “indecipherable magma.” We fear it means chaos. But it is a transformational mode of apprehending.
Lavie’s work, neither as ambitious nor as mature as Glissant’s, nonetheless provides an instance of the problematics of Relation and its poetics. The conjunctions of the Mzeini with foreign incursions and with the anthropologist from the occupying nation who feels marginalized in her own country as a dark-skinned woman, the paradoxes of these conjunctions, create occasions for their questioning who is Other, and where, and when, and how the questions can be framed, if not answered, in poetry and performance. Lavie leaves us, as she is left, with these questions. But her book helps us perceive a poetics as something essential to any humanity refusing to accept the muted condition of an imposed Otherness.
III
I was starting to write this early in the Ninth month, month of the Jewish New Year, in the second year of the Palestinian Al-Aqsa intifada. The time of year—the season and its Jewish inflection—never fails to give me pause, though I am a secular Jew. Each year, among the powerful questions of early autumn, I am caught by the sharpening light, the shortening days, the silver eyelash of a crescent moon in the west, the sense that, indeed, this is a time of reckoning, and it is brief. In Judaism it’s a season for recognition of self and other, acknowledging our violations against others, forgiving and asking forgiveness, for changing our ways of being in the world, recognizing that in the coming year some will live and some will die, wishing to be reinscribed in the Book of Life, wishing the coming months to be sweet and not bitter. And I think of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Autumn Day,” which ends,
Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.7
Rilke sets the unbuilt house—the house that will not get built after all—in conjunction with aloneness (a condition he knew well). What is this house? Surely in the largest sense it’s whatever we mean by the soul. And if a house is a space indicating relatedness, not just a shelter but a place inhabited with others, a site of both intimacy and hospitality, an unbuilt house
suggests relation not accomplished.
Early last September, for me, the thought inevitably followed of long-inhabited houses bulldozed, villages strafed, orchards and avenues obliterated—the antipoetics of a military occupation, force that can destroy but is unable to build, the absolute negation of relatedness.
IV
I left, at this point, my subversion of a lecture, my computer screen, my desk, my house, to fly to the Midwest for a couple of poetry readings. While eating breakfast in a Missouri motel I learned that the two tallest skyscrapers in New York had been demolished in a terrorist attack, with still untold losses of lives, and that all the airports in the country were shut down. Subsequently that day I was driven by a car service up through the heart of the United States to Minneapolis. My driver and companion was a retired fireman from St. Louis, and for eleven hours we listened to the radio, talked, and drove, up through Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, stopping for gas and snacks, trying to make sense of what we were hearing. The fields around us were voluble in harvest, the rivers glittered, the interstate highways swooped over the cities—a landscape not without its aggressive billboards marketing both religion and property, but overall a scene of apparent peace and plenty. The driver was an ordinary, acute, reflective man who was interested in politics, read newspapers and magazines; we soon trusted each other, as strangers, with our deep distrust of the Bush administration and what it would make of the disaster. At our final rest stop somewhere in southern Minnesota, while he smoked a pipe, we sat looking up at the enormous prairie sky, dark by now, pulsing with the constellations and the Milky Way.
It soon became a media and pundit cliché in the United States to say that on September 11 “everything changed.” Certainly the fireman and I were as shocked and stunned that day as any two people distant from lower Manhattan could be. But I also felt like someone who has been watching a reckless, stoned driver take off in his expensive car again and again, and who hears on the news that he has had a fatal crash. As the days and weeks and months passed, as I traded phone calls and visits and e-mails and letters with friends and political comrades and fellow artists, with neighbors and acquaintances, as we learned that “America has gone to war” and that unheard-of military and security measures must and would be taken for the protection of our victimized nation, as the Stars and Stripes flew from the radio antennae of enormous private vehicles and appeared in the anxious windows of small immigrant shops, as the bombing of an already suffering and impoverished country became our American twenty-first-century crusade, our mission, as that crusade was declared to extend to the entire globe, as news of domestic corruption on a seemingly unheard of scale (because so many of us did not know our economic history) vied on television with our vaunted military prowess against evil, as private and public grief for civilian losses from many cultures and nations at the World Trade Center had to make way for the patriotic imperative to spend, consume, rescue the economy for profiteering and militarization, as fear was sowed broadside by our government as well as by lethal extremist acts—I can only say that in this pressure chamber of history and politics, a great many elements previously held to be separate began to mix and fuse.
For an American poet, an unrepentant socialist and feminist, a critic of her government and its lamentable record of service to the country, it was not that “everything had changed” but that everything had been flung into sharper relief. The nation had in fact been riven within and whirling in megalomaniac violence abroad and for a long time, fantasizing itself safe behind the electronic fences and stockpiled resources of a gated community. In a newspaper column on September 30, 2001, the poet David Budbill observed: “Some people have been saying that the American age of innocence is over. What is over is the American age of impunity.”8
Now, a government that had seized power through a corrupt electoral process bade us draw together for security under the flag of national unity. Dissent was collaboration with evil. We were citizens of a body insulted and wounded, and endless war would be the nostrum of our pain.
But there was nothing sudden about this. Writing in the late 1940s, the poet Muriel Rukeyser had warned that
American poetry has been part of a culture in conflict. . . . We are people tending toward democracy at the level of hope; on another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the concept of perpetual warfare. It is the history of the idea of war that is beneath our other histories.9
Since September 11, 2001, that idea of perpetual war has simply been made explicit policy—foreign and domestic.
A poet friend, Ed Pavlić, sent me, in late September 2001, a passage from James Baldwin’s 1961 novel, Another Country:
A sign advertised the chewing gum which would help one to relax and keep smiling. A hotel’s enormous neon name challenged the starless sky. So did the names of movie stars and people currently appearing or scheduled to appear on Broadway, along with the mile-high names of the vehicles which would carry them into immortality. The great buildings, unlit, blunt like the phallus or sharp like the spear, guarded the city which never slept.
Beneath them Rufus walked, one of the fallen—for the weight of this city was murderous—one of those who had been crushed on the day, which was every day, these towers fell. Entirely alone, and dying of it, he was part of an unprecedented multitude.10
A century before, Walt Whitman, sometimes taken as the voice of American optimism and overreaching destiny, was in fact continually bringing up short, accusing, the complacencies of national chauvinism. Let several instances stand for many: some passages from his Democratic Vistas:
In vain have we annex’d Texas, California, Alaska, and reach north for Canada and south for Cuba. It is as if we were somehow being endow’d with a vast and more and more thoroughly appointed body, and then left with little or no soul. . . .
The great word Solidarity has arisen. Of all dangers to a nation, as things exist in our day, there can be no greater one than having certain portions of the people set off from the rest by a line drawn—they not privileged as others, but degraded, humiliated, made of no account. Much quackery teems, of course, even on democracy’s side, yet does not really affect the orbic quality of the matter. . . .
We have frequently printed the word Democracy. Yet I cannot too often repeat that it is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawaken’d, notwithstanding the resonances and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted.11
Whitman’s sweeping, peopled landscapes are vistas of possibility, not odes to empire.
The poet Michael Harper has written of the early 1960s as “a promissory note and the first harbinger of a failed notion of freedom and the institutions that needed replenishing over the long haul. . . . I began to write poems because I could not see those elements of my life that I considered sacred reflected in my courses of study: scientific, linguistic, and literary. . . . I set out on a path to document those elements of contradiction most salient to my antenna and to find a speech that would have some influence on the world I was forced to live in.” He alludes to an “element of foreboding” in this poetic process.12
Foreboding and warning: a multiplicity of American artists have seismically registered the fault lines and shifting plates of the republic and of its foreign adventures. Many have been written off as ideologues, leftists, treasonable to their nation and to their art; or, especially in the case of African Americans, selectively ignored. But I would claim that an engaged and freely ranging imagination will be stubbornly resistant to institutions and governments that inflict enormous divisions and suppress enormous human possibilities. It is in fact through art that those possibilities continually reembody and reiterate themselves and, like William Carlos Williams’s saxifrage flower, split the rocks.
V
To reread Duncan’s poem
s was to be reminded of this. “A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar”13 is a long and complex work, from which I must reluctantly excerpt. Moving from the classical lyre of Apollo and the myth of Cupid and Psyche (eros and soul), it becomes a poem distinctively of the United States. And Duncan turns from the Greek celebration of aesthetic male youth to two aging American poets, Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound, Pound in his late “Pisan Cantos,” Whitman in his old age, stricken in language.
In time we see a tragedy, a loss of beauty
the glittering youth
of the god retains—but from this threshold
it is age
that is beautiful. It is toward the old poets
we go, to their faltering,
their unfaltering wrongness that has style,
their variable truth,
the old faces,
words shed like tears from
a plenitude of powers time stores.
Whitman groping for words:
A stroke. These little strokes. A chill.
The old man, feeble, does not recoil.
Recall. A phase so minute,
only part of the word in- jerrd.
damerging a nuv. A nerb.
The Present dented of the U
nighted stayd.States.The heavy clod?
Cloud.Invades the brain. What
if lilacslast in this dooryard bloomd?
“When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”—Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln. And so Duncan moves into a bitterly decelebrating roster of American presidents:
Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower—
where among these did the power reside
that moves the heart? What flower of the nation
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